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Have You Noticed Those Weird New Mailboxes? Here’s Why They Changed

Mail fishing had been on the rise until the Postal Service unleashed a newfangled mailbox to combat the crime throughout the New York region.

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Mailboxes with pull-down handles in the New York City region are being replaced with narrow letter slot boxes.CreditCreditEarl Wilson/The New York Times

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The crime is deceptively simple and maddeningly effective.

Thieves, often at night, use string to lower glue-covered rodent traps or bottles coated with an adhesive down the chute of a sidewalk mailbox. This bait attaches to the envelopes inside, and the fish in this case — mail containing gift cards, money orders or checks, which can be altered with chemicals and cashed — are reeled out slowly.

This low-tech crime, which became common in the Bronx, is known as mail fishing.

Now it has met its match.

The United States Postal Service is replacing or retrofitting mailboxes in much of the northeast to eliminate the pull-down handle in favor of a slender mail slot with a singular goal: foiling thieves.

All of the approximately 7,000 mailboxes in New York City and those in other parts of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts are being revamped. No plans yet exist for a nationwide overhaul, officials said, but in areas where fishing becomes prevalent, the thief-proof boxes will likely follow.

“It’s safety, with anything. Twenty years ago, maybe you wouldn’t have locked your door, or locked your car. But as time changes, we all have to change with it,” said Donna Harris, a spokeswoman for the New York division of the United States Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement arm of the Postal Service that works closely with local and State Police departments.

The mail slots are only large enough for letters, meaning sending even small packages will require a trip to the post office. The opening is also equipped with a mechanism that grabs at a letter once inserted, making it difficult to retract. (With an air of crime-fighting secrecy, postal inspectors declined to elaborate on precisely how the device works. “Those features on the box, what we like to call the Cadillac of mailboxes, those are things I can’t talk about,” Ms. Harris said.)

Most mail fishing thefts are done by lone thieves looking for quick cash. Though in some instances, the New York Police Department has partnered with the F.B.I. to take down organized crime rings that aim to not only steal money, but to commit identity theft, bank fraud and more.

“Those cases deal with thefts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Lt. Tara Deckert, of the Police Department’s grand larceny division.

In 2018, about 3,000 incidents of fishing were reported in New York City, up from 2,800 the year before, said Jason Savino, the grand larceny division’s commanding officer.

As of March 1, 352 mail fishing incidents had been reported in New York City this year, placing the city on track to record a 30 percent reduction in fishing from last year — a decline officials attribute to the newfangled boxes.

Still, with tax season in full swing, the police are warning snail mail users to remain vigilant. Postal inspectors and the police also suggest that people use gel pens rather than ballpoint on mailed checks to make them harder to erase, and to deposit mail just before a scheduled pickup time so that envelopes do not sit in boxes overnight.

“During tax season, there probably is a greater chance of catching fish, so to speak,” Officer Savino said.

Once boxes have been hit by thieves five or more times they are labeled “hot boxes” by the police and prioritized for surveillance or upgrades, Lieutenant Deckert said.

All of the mailboxes in the Bronx already have been replaced or retrofitted, and Manhattan’s overhaul will be complete by summer. Mailboxes in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island are slowly being upgraded.

Alexander Sylvester, a postal inspector with the Philadelphia division that also covers a large swath of New Jersey, said his office is trying hard to change “as many bins as possible,” but have prioritized areas most impacted by theft.

The introduction of the new boxes has led to some confusion.

One letter carrier in Midtown Manhattan said the volume of mail in the boxes he empties seems to have decreased by about half, and a few customers have asked him if the box was locked.

The Postal Service, which has been struggling financially for years in the face of declining mail volume, did not respond to questions about the average cost of each new or updated mailbox, or whether the overhaul had made an additional dent in mail volume.

Earlier this month, Mary Stella, who lives in Midtown Manhattan, peered and poked at the slot before inserting her letter. “The first time I used this box, I was confused,” Ms. Stella admitted, but added that she is a fan of the new design “because you can’t stick your hands inside and take things out.”

It is also not possible to insert a package containing an object that could cause harm, although preventing terrorism is not the primary goal.

“Obviously the boxes could have more than one purpose, but the boxes are being placed to thwart mail theft,” Ms. Harris said.

In addition to the new mail slots, some bins are being moved altogether for security reasons. Mailboxes that had been accessible for drive-by drop offs, for example, have been relocated next to post offices for better surveillance, officials said.

Even with the security upgrades, Margret Temple, of the Upper West Side, said she has not used a royal blue sidewalk mailbox for more than a year.

“I just go to the post office because it’s just safer,” said Ms. Temple, 65.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Coming to a Corner Near You: New Mailboxes That Foil Thieves. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### In an Age of Cybercrime, Low-Tech Thieves Target Mailboxes - The New York Times

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In an Age of Cybercrime, Low-Tech Thieves Target Mailboxes

The streets of Upper Manhattan were quiet, but a police officer saw two men standing in front of a blue mailbox at Broadway and Academy Street.

It was around 1:30 a.m., Jan. 17.

One of the men was holding a plastic bottle, which was tied to a string. While his partner stood lookout, the other man lowered the bottle into the mailbox, as if he were feeding a line off a pier, played the string a bit, then pulled it out.

Four pieces of mail were stuck to the bottle.

When the police officer stepped forward, the two men took off, leaving behind the plastic bottle. They were quickly caught. The mail was stuck on the bottle with glue.

“Such devices are commonly used to obtain mail from inside of mailboxes,” Officer Vito Guagenti said in a criminal complaint.

This may be the age of cybercrime, but in some New York neighborhoods crooks are on a spree of fishing old-fashioned snail mail out of street corner mailboxes, using decidedly low-tech tools like plastic bottles, glue and string.

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A message left on a mailbox on Bennett Avenue in Manhattan last month.CreditNikita Stewart/The New York Times

Or, as in another case in Upper Manhattan, a glue trap like those typically used to catch mice.

Some thieves wash the ink off the checks they snare and change the payees’ names. Others make trouble by using the account information.

Over the last year or so, the police and postal inspectors made about 150 arrests in the Bronx on charges of mail fishing, according to Donna Harris, a spokeswoman in New York for the United States Postal Inspection Service.

“We’ve been keeping this low profile,” she said. After realizing that “we weren’t going to arrest our way out of the problem,” Ms. Harris said, the postal authorities started changing the Bronx street mailboxes to make them harder to pilfer.

Like fishing fleets that go where the schools are running, the mail thieves seemed to have pulled anchor in the Bronx and sailed to northern Manhattan. Since October, 14 arrests have been made there, Ms. Harris said.

The crime wave had little chance of staying low profile, thanks to social media and reporting by the news website DNAinfo. Residents have taped warnings on the boxes after finding coatings of glue, or double-side tape.

Laurie Piette was walking her dog one morning in November in the Inwood neighborhood and spotted an envelope addressed to Con Edison that was stuck to a mouse glue trap. The envelope had been torn open, but the return address was legible. She posted an inquiry on Facebook.

Eventually, word got to the sender, Helen M. Churko, who had mailed her Con Edison bill and check a few days earlier.

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A mouse glue trap found in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan had a Con Edison envelope stuck to it.CreditLaurie Piette

A picture of the torn envelope stuck to the mouse glue trap was posted online.

“It was a great photograph,” Ms. Churko said, but shocking. “Literally the minute I stopped getting hysterical, I called my bank and told them what was going on.”

With electronic payment available for many bills, you might think that the pickings would be slim for mailbox thieves. But particularly in parts of Inwood and along Fort Washington Avenue in Washington Heights, older residents are more likely to use checks to pay their bills by mail.

For her part, Ms. Churko said she wrote checks because she was on computers all day at work. “I’m old school when it comes to things like money,” she said. “There are too many stories about cybertheft and identity theft.”

Also, many landlords do not accept electronic payment. A few days into January, Andrew Graham dropped his rent check into a mailbox at Broadway and Dongan Place. He got a call from his bank. Someone had taken the check and written another name over the landlord’s. “Whoever’s committing fraud in this way is really looking for unbanked folks who are mailing out money orders or cash,” he said.

Barbara Kennedy mailed her rent check in a box at Fort Washington Avenue and 183rd Street after the last pickup on Dec. 28. The next morning, she saw the mailbox had been pried open and emptied. She stopped payment. “I put two posts on Facebook to alert people,” Ms. Kennedy said.

People are being advised not to deposit mail after the last pickup of the day or on weekends. “That lets it sit in the box overnight,” said Ms. Harris of the postal inspectors. (She said to report suspicious activity to 212-330-2400 or 911.)

The Police Department also advised using gel ink, which is harder to wash off.

“We’re supposed to write our checks with indelible ink?” Ms. Churko said. “This ticks me off even more.”

Email: dwyer@nytimes.com
Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: In an Age of Cybercrime, Low-Tech Thieves Target Mailboxes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Saudis’ Image Makers: A Troll Army and a Twitter Insider - The New York Times

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Saudis’ Image Makers: A Troll Army and a Twitter Insider

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Online attackers who targeted Jamal Khashoggi were part of a broad effort ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his close advisers to silence Saudi critics.CreditCreditChris J. Ratcliffe/Getty Images

Each morning, Jamal Khashoggi would check his phone to discover what fresh hell had been unleashed while he was sleeping.

He would see the work of an army of Twitter trolls, ordered to attack him and other influential Saudis who had criticized the kingdom’s leaders. He sometimes took the attacks personally, so friends made a point of calling frequently to check on his mental state.

“The mornings were the worst for him because he would wake up to the equivalent of sustained gunfire online,” said Maggie Mitchell Salem, a friend of Mr. Khashoggi’s for more than 15 years.

Mr. Khashoggi’s online attackers were part of a broad effort dictated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his close advisers to silence critics both inside Saudi Arabia and abroad. Hundreds of people work at a so-called troll farm in Riyadh to smother the voices of dissidents like Mr. Khashoggi. The vigorous push also appears to include the grooming — not previously reported — of a Saudi employee at Twitter whom Western intelligence officials suspected of spying on user accounts to help the Saudi leadership.

The killing by Saudi agents of Mr. Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, has focused the world’s attention on the kingdom’s intimidation campaign against influential voices raising questions about the darker side of the crown prince. The young royal has tightened his grip on the kingdom while presenting himself in Western capitals as the man to reform the hidebound Saudi state.

This portrait of the kingdom’s image management crusade is based on interviews with seven people involved in those efforts or briefed on them; activists and experts who have studied them; and American and Saudi officials, along with messages seen by The New York Times that described the inner workings of the troll farm.

Saudi operatives have mobilized to harass critics on Twitter, a wildly popular platform for news in the kingdom since the Arab Spring uprisings began in 2010. Saud al-Qahtani, a top adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed who was fired on Saturday in the fallout from Mr. Khashoggi’s killing, was the strategist behind the operation, according to United States and Saudi officials, as well as activist organizations.

Many Saudis had hoped that Twitter would democratize discourse by giving everyday citizens a voice, but Saudi Arabia has instead become an illustration of how authoritarian governments can manipulate social media to silence or drown out critical voices while spreading their own version of reality.

“In the Gulf, the stakes are so high for those who engage in dissent that the benefits of using social media are outweighed by the negatives, and in Saudi Arabia in particular,” said Marc Owen Jones, a lecturer in the history of the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula at Exeter University in Britain.

Neither Saudi officials nor Mr. Qahtani responded to requests for comment about the kingdom’s efforts to control online conversations.

Before his death, Mr. Khashoggi was launching projects to combat online abuse and to try to reveal that Crown Prince Mohammed was mismanaging the country. In September, Mr. Khashoggi wired $5,000 to Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident living in Canada, who was creating a volunteer army to combat the government trolls on Twitter. The volunteers called themselves the “Electronic Bees.”

Eleven days before Mr. Khashoggi died in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, he wrote on Twitter that the Bees were coming.

One arm of the crackdown on dissidents originates from offices and homes in and around Riyadh, where hundreds of young men hunt on Twitter for voices and conversations to silence. This is the troll farm, described by three people briefed on the project and the messages among group members.

Its directors routinely discuss ways to combat dissent, settling on sensitive themes like the war in Yemen or women’s rights. They then turn to their well-organized army of “social media specialists” via group chats in apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, sending them lists of people to threaten, insult and intimidate; daily tweet quotas to fill; and pro-government messages to augment.

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The Saudi government has hired hundreds of men to harass detractors on Twitter, which has had trouble combating their attacks.CreditDavid Paul Morris/Bloomberg

The bosses also send memes that their employees can use to mock dissenters, like an image of Crown Prince Mohammed dancing with a sword, akin to the cartoons of Pepe the Frog that supporters of President Trump used to undermine opponents.

The specialists scour Twitter for conversations on the assigned topics and post messages from the several accounts they each run. Sometimes, when contentious discussions take off, they publish pornographic images to goose engagement with their own posts and distract users from more relevant conversations.

Other times, if one account is blocked by too many other users, they simply close it and open a new one.

In one conversation viewed by The Times, dozens of leaders decided to mute critics of Saudi Arabia’s military attacks on Yemen by reporting the messages to Twitter as “sensitive.” Such reported posts are one of the things Twitter considers as signals when it decides to hide content from other users, blunting its impact.

Twitter has had difficulty combating the trolls. The company can detect and disable the machine-like behaviors of bot accounts, but it has a harder time picking up on the humans tweeting on behalf of the Saudi government.

The specialists found the jobs through Twitter itself, responding to ads that said only that an employer sought young men willing to tweet for about 10,000 Saudi riyals a month, equivalent to about $3,000.

The political nature of the work was revealed only after they were interviewed and expressed interest in the job. According to the people The Times interviewed, some of the specialists felt they would have been targeted as possible dissenters themselves if they had turned down the job.

The specialists heard directors speak often of Mr. Qahtani. Labeled by activists and writers as the “troll master,” “Saudi Arabia’s Steve Bannon” and “lord of the flies” — for the bots and online attackers sometimes called “flies” by their victims — Mr. Qahtani had gained influence since the young crown prince consolidated power.

He ran media operations inside the royal court, which involved directing the country’s local media, arranging interviews for foreign journalists with the crown prince, and using his Twitter following of 1.35 million to marshal the kingdom’s online defenders against enemies including Qatar, Iran and Canada, as well as dissident Saudi voices like Mr. Khashoggi’s.

For a while, he tweeted using the hashtag #The_Black_List, calling on his followers to suggest perceived enemies of the kingdom.

“Saudi Arabia and its brothers do what they say. That’s a promise,” he tweeted last year. “Add every name you think should be added to #The_Black_List using the hashtag. We will filter them and track them starting now.”

Twitter executives first became aware of a possible plot to infiltrate user accounts at the end of 2015, when Western intelligence officials told them that the Saudis were grooming an employee, Ali Alzabarah, to spy on the accounts of dissidents and others, according to five people briefed on the matter. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Mr. Alzabarah had joined Twitter in 2013 and had risen through the ranks to an engineering position that gave him access to the personal information and account activity of Twitter’s users, including phone numbers and I.P. addresses, unique identifiers for devices connected to the internet.

The intelligence officials told the Twitter executives that Mr. Alzabarah had grown closer to Saudi intelligence operatives, who eventually persuaded him to peer into several user accounts, according to three of the people briefed on the matter.

Caught off guard by the government outreach, the Twitter executives placed Mr. Alzabarah on administrative leave, questioned him and conducted a forensic analysis to determine what information he may have accessed. They could not find evidence that he had handed over Twitter data to the Saudi government, but they nonetheless fired him in December 2015.

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Before his killing, Mr. Khashoggi was starting projects to combat online abuse.CreditShannon Stapleton/Reuters

Mr. Alzabarah returned to Saudi Arabia shortly after, taking few possessions with him. He now works with the Saudi government, a person briefed on the matter said.

A spokesman for Twitter declined to comment. Mr. Alzabarah did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Saudi officials.

On Dec. 11, 2015, Twitter sent out safety notices to the owners of a few dozen accounts Mr. Alzabarah had accessed. Among them were security and privacy researchers, surveillance specialists, policy academics and journalists. A number of them worked for the Tor project, an organization that trains activists and reporters on how to protect their privacy. Citizens in countries with repressive governments have long used Tor to circumvent firewalls and evade government surveillance.

“As a precaution, we are alerting you that your Twitter account is one of a small group of accounts that may have been targeted by state-sponsored actors,” the emails from Twitter said.

The Saudis’ sometimes ruthless image-making campaign is also a byproduct of the kingdom’s increasingly fragile position internationally. For decades, their coffers bursting from the world’s thirst for oil, Saudi leaders cared little about what other countries thought of the kingdom, its governance or its anachronistic restrictions on women.

But Saudi Arabia is confronting a more uncertain economic future as oil prices have fallen and competition among energy suppliers has grown, and Crown Prince Mohammed has tried relentlessly to attract foreign investment into the country — in part by portraying it as a vibrant, more socially progressive country than it once was.

Yet the government’s social media manipulation tracks with crackdowns in recent years in other authoritarian states, said Alexei Abrahams, a research fellow at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

Even for conversations involving millions of tweets, a few hundred or a few thousand influential accounts drive the discussion, he said, citing new research. The Saudi government appears to have realized this and tried to take control of the conversation, he added.

“From the regime’s point of view,” he said, “if there are only a few thousand accounts driving the discourse, you can just buy or threaten the activists, and that significantly shapes the conversation.”

As the Saudi government tried to remake its image, it carefully tracked how some of its more controversial decisions were received, and how the country’s most influential citizens online shaped those perceptions.

After the country announced economic austerity measures in 2015 to offset low oil prices and control a widening budget gap, McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, measured the public reception of those policies.

In a nine-page report, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, McKinsey found that the measures received twice as much coverage on Twitter as in the country’s traditional news media or blogs, and that negative sentiment far outweighed positive reactions on social media.

Three people were driving the conversation on Twitter, the firm found: the writer Khalid al-Alkami; Mr. Abdulaziz, the young dissident living in Canada; and an anonymous user who went by Ahmad.

After the report was issued, Mr. Alkami was arrested, the human rights group ALQST said. Mr. Abdulaziz said that Saudi government officials imprisoned two of his brothers and hacked his cellphone, an account supported by a researcher at Citizen Lab. Ahmad, the anonymous account, was shut down.

McKinsey said the austerity report was an internal document based on publicly available information and not prepared for any government entity.

“We are horrified by the possibility, however remote, that it could have been misused,” a McKinsey spokesman said in a statement. “We have seen no evidence to suggest that it was misused, but we are urgently investigating how and with whom the document was shared.”

Adam Goldman and Karam Shoumali contributed reporting.

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Saudis Deploy a Swarm Of Online Trolls to Stifle Critics Like Khashoggi. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Squid Share a Colorful Trick With Peacocks - The New York Times

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Trilobites

Squid Share a Colorful Trick With Peacocks

With its skin using multiple strategies, the cephalopod becomes a chameleon of the ocean.

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The longfin inshore squidCreditCreditJeff Rotman/The Image Bank, via Getty

Squid are chameleons of the ocean, shifting effortlessly from hue to hue as they cross sand, coral and grass. Scientists have long studied the peculiar structures in their skin that interact with light, trying to understand how the animals change color so swiftly and with such precision.

Now, a paper published last week in Nature Communications suggests that their chromatophores, previously thought to be mainly pockets of pigment embedded in their skin, are also equipped with tiny reflectors made of proteins. These reflectors aid the squid to produce such a wide array of colors, including iridescent greens and blues, within a second of passing in front of a new background. The research reveals that by using tricks found in other parts of the animal kingdom — like shimmering butterflies and peacocks — squid are able to combine multiple approaches to produce their vivid camouflage.

The researchers studied Doryteuthis pealeii, or the longfin squid, which is found in the North Atlantic Ocean and might turn up on your plate when you order calamari.

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Its chromatophores contain individual sacs of yellow, red or brown pigment. Each one is also ringed with small muscles that allow the animal to clench shut or open wide each chromatophore. That means that in front of brown sea grass, for example, red and yellow chromatophores might cinch closed, allowing the brown pigments to show.

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Under illumination and electrical stimulation, the chromatophores on squid skin open.CreditCreditBy Stephen Senft

But what is the source of all those vivid blues and greens that squid are known to display? Researchers had long imagined that the layer below the chromatophores in the squid’s skin might be responsible for those pyrotechnic shimmers. That underlayer is essentially an enormous reflector, made of cells that make a protein called reflectin.

However, that layer responds to changes too slowly to be the sole source of those colors, said Leila Deravi, a professor of chemistry at Northeastern University and an author of the new paper.

In search of answers, she and her collaborators at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Ma., and elsewhere put squid skin under the microscope and saw something reflective on the surface of the chromatophores. As they moved a beam of light to shine at different angles off the skin, the round blobs of yellow, red and brown pigment lit up like Christmas trees.

“We saw a really bright, metallic-y kind of color associated with the chromatophores,” said Dr. Deravi. “And at different angles we could see blue-greens come out, we could see just the whole spectrum of color emerge.”

Analyzing the proteins that the chromatophore cells were making, the team realized that reflectin was among them, and they confirmed with further lab work that it was distributed around the surface of the chromatophores.

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Many colors reflected from a single yellow chromatophore under illumination.CreditCreditBy Stephen Senft

Light strikes arrays of reflectin, bounces around and refracts out, producing colors. The same kind of interaction, called structural color, produces the blue of a morpho butterfly’s wings, a peacock’s tail father or a blue human eye.

Pigments, by contrast, like the one behind brown eyes, are small molecules that simply absorb some colors of light and release others. These are fundamentally different ways of making color. But squid have the benefit of both.

The squid control the movement of the reflectin that is on the outside of the chromatophores with the same movements that control the opening and closing of the structure’s mouth, manipulating both kinds of color simultaneously. With this intimate connection between the two, “these cephalopods have evolved a way to help them become one of the fastest camouflaging species on the planet,” Dr. Deravi said.

The shimmering, shifting surface of the squid’s skin may someday provide insights for new materials that use the same tricks. But how exactly the squid matches its perception of its environment to its appearance using the precise manipulation of thousands of structures all over its skin is still a subject of much research.

“We were always continuously surprised by these animals. As soon as you think you kind of understand how they work, you find something else,” Dr. Deravi said.

Correction: 

An earlier version of this article misstated the home institution of some researchers who studied squid. They were from the Marine Biological Laboratory, not the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: Colorful Squid: Heard About The Chicken of the Sea? Well, Here’s A Peacock of the Ocean. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### California Passes Sweeping Law to Protect Online Privacy - The New York Times

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California Passes Sweeping Law to Protect Online Privacy

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A new privacy law in California, believed to be the toughest in the United States, gives consumers new rights over their personal data.CreditCreditJason Henry for The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — California has passed a digital privacy law granting consumers more control over and insight into the spread of their personal information online, creating one of the most significant regulations overseeing the data-collection practices of technology companies in the United States.

The bill raced through the State Legislature without opposition on Thursday and was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, just hours before a deadline to pull from the November ballot an initiative seeking even tougher oversight over technology companies.

The new law grants consumers the right to know what information companies are collecting about them, why they are collecting that data and with whom they are sharing it. It gives consumers the right to tell companies to delete their information as well as to not sell or share their data. Businesses must still give consumers who opt out the same quality of service.

It also makes it more difficult to share or sell data on children younger than 16.

The legislation, which goes into effect in January 2020, makes it easier for consumers to sue companies after a data breach. And it gives the state’s attorney general more authority to fine companies that don’t adhere to the new regulations.

The California law is not as expansive as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., a new set of laws restricting how tech companies collect, store and use personal data.

But Aleecia M. McDonald, an incoming assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in privacy policy, said California’s privacy measure was one of the most comprehensive in the United States, since most existing laws — and there are not many — do little to limit what companies can do with consumer information.

“It’s a step forward, and it should be appreciated as a step forward when it’s been a long time since there were any steps,” Ms. McDonald said.

The legislation is modeled closely on the ballot initiative, which a real estate developer, Alastair Mactaggart, spent $3 million and secured more than 600,000 signatures to get certified. With the ballot proposal hanging over legislators’ heads, the push for an alternative gained grudging support.

If the bill had failed to pass before the deadline, the proponents of the ballot initiative would have taken their case straight to voters in November, they said.

The state’s technology and business lobbies were opposed to the measure that was passed on Thursday, but they didn’t try to derail it because they thought the ballot initiative was worse.

Even legislators who voted for the bill complained that they had little choice because a ballot measure would provide less flexibility to make changes in the future. And some privacy advocates said the bill did not go as far as the ballot initiative in allowing individuals to sue for not complying.

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Alastair Mactaggart, center, along with allies like Rick Arney and Mary Ross, backed a California ballot initiative on data privacy. That effort prompted the State Legislature to pass a law instead on Thursday.CreditJason Henry for The New York Times

Mr. Mactaggart said he wanted a sensible privacy law, whether through a ballot measure or the legislative process. He said that the Legislature was the right place to debate such a policy, but that it had been hard to get legislators to address privacy.

“If we didn’t have the initiative process in California, we wouldn’t be here today,” Mr. Mactaggart said in an interview.

One of the authors of the new law, Assemblyman Ed Chau, a Democrat, tried last year to pass a bill that would have required internet service providers to seek permission from customers before accessing, selling or sharing their browser activity. The bill never made it out of committee — an example of the influence of telecommunications and technology companies in California.

But with the ballot measure looming and a growing awareness of how technology companies are gobbling up user information — highlighted by revelations that the voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica gained access to the personal data of millions of Facebook users — the legislation went from draft to law in one week.

“This is a huge step forward to people all across the country dealing with this very challenging issue,” State Senator Bob Hertzberg, a Democrat and a co-author of the bill, said at a news conference after it was signed.

The ballot initiative, which would have made it easier for private individuals to sue companies for not adhering to its privacy requirements, had drawn vocal opposition from industry groups that worried about the potential liability risk.

The measure included a provision that would have required a 70 percent majority in both houses of the Legislature to approve any changes after it became law.

Google, Facebook, Verizon, Comcast and AT&T each contributed $200,000 to a committee opposing the proposed ballot measure, and lobbyists had estimated that businesses would spend $100 million to campaign against it before the November election.

Robert Callahan, a vice president of state government affairs for the Internet Association, an industry group that includes Google, Facebook and Amazon, said in a statement that the new law contained many “problematic provisions.” But the group did not try to obstruct it, he added, because “it prevents the even worse ballot initiative from becoming law in California.”

Mr. Callahan said the group would “work to correct the inevitable, negative policy and compliance ramifications this last-minute deal will create.”

Legislators said they expected to pass “cleanup bills” to make any fixes to the law in the 18 months before it takes effect. Some privacy advocates are worried that lobbyists for business and technology groups will use that time to water it down.

Mr. Mactaggart said those concerns are “overblown.”

“Having gotten this right, it’ll be very hard to take it away,” he said, noting that the ballot measure had been polling at around 80 percent approval. “They can’t rewrite the law.”

Follow Daisuke Wakabayashi on Twitter: @daiwaka.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: California Passes Major Online Privacy Law. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Politics - The New York Times

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#####EOF##### U.S. Steps Up Airstrikes Against ISIS After It Gains Territory in Afghanistan - The New York Times

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U.S. Steps Up Airstrikes Against ISIS After It Gains Territory in Afghanistan

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Afghan security forces on patrol after an operation against Islamic State militants in Nangarhar Province last month.CreditCreditNoorullah Shirzada/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

WASHINGTON — The United States has significantly intensified its bombing campaign in Afghanistan in the past two months as part of President Obama’s widening war against the Islamic State militants who have seized territory outside of Iraq and Syria, according to senior military commanders.

American drones and fighter jets dropped 251 bombs and missiles in January and February in Afghanistan, more than three times the strikes in the same period last year, according to data compiled by the Air Force.

The strikes came in response to a decision by Mr. Obama around the beginning of the year that gave the military more leeway to launch attacks on Islamic State militants who had gained control over territory in several provinces, including areas in the Tora Bora region, where Osama bin Laden once took refuge.

Afghan and American commanders said that while the strikes have dealt a blow to the Islamic State, they have broader concerns about the security situation in Afghanistan because the Taliban appear stronger than at any point since 2001, and its 20,000 to 40,000 fighters are estimated to be at least 20 times the number of militants aligned with the Islamic State.

The widening nature of the air campaign — and the fact that the United States is increasing its strikes in Afghanistan a little more than a year after Mr. Obama declared an end to combat missions there — has set off a debate inside the administration and among national security experts. Some have questioned whether the administration should treat each emerging Islamic State affiliate as a legitimate threat to the United States that requires a military response, and whether the focus should be more on the Taliban than the Islamic State.

Under the current rules of engagement ordered by Mr. Obama, American forces can attack the Taliban if they pose a direct threat to those forces. The military has far more latitude to engage fighters from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Gen. John F. Campbell, the departing American commander in Afghanistan, said that broader authority granted to him by Mr. Obama to attack Islamic State fighters had enabled him to take more aggressive measures against the terrorist group.

“We’ve significantly increased our ability to go after ISIL, particularly in Nangarhar,” General Campbell said, referring to the province in eastern Afghanistan that includes part of the Tora Bora mountain region.

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Gen. John F. Campbell, the departing American commander in Afghanistan, at a news conference in Kabul last month.CreditPool photo by Omar Sobhani

General Campbell had asked the administration to give the military more authority to strike the Taliban.

Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter are in the process of making recommendations to Mr. Obama that would expand the military’s authority in Afghanistan.

The potential changes would “make us more effective in supporting Afghan forces in 2016,” General Dunford said Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a private organization that tracks airstrikes, said that between 332 and 359 people have been killed in American air attacks in January and February, five times the number from the first two months of 2015.

The strikes this year occurred at the highest rate since American aircraft launched 490 strikes in 2013, according to the Air Force. In the same period in 2014, there were 206 airstrikes. There were 70 in that time in 2015.

Three-quarters of the strikes this year were conducted by drones, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The organization said one civilian — a child — was killed in the attacks.

Afghanistan is at least the fourth country where Mr. Obama has struck fighters aligned with the Islamic State. Along with the daily bombings against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria, the United States has conducted strikes and operations in Libya in recent months.

Mr. Obama, who has been criticized for not acting forcefully enough to defeat the Islamic State, adopted a two-pronged strategy last year for defeating the group.

That approach focused on pushing the Islamic State out of the main cities it controlled in Iraq and Syria with the use of Arab forces on the ground and American airpower, and defeating the affiliates that had metastasized elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and southwest Asia.

Some officials and experts contend that the affiliates merely represent the opportunistic rebranding by existing local militant groups seeking global notoriety and, possibly, financial or technical assistance.

But others argue that the affiliates — which have governed some cities and towns under strict Islamic law, and have shown a penchant for brutal violence — must be stopped before they grow.

“There is no limit if one decides we should go after ISIS wherever it is,” said Paul R. Pillar, a former C.I.A. analyst who teaches at Georgetown University.

Many of the Islamic State militants in Afghanistan are former members of the Pakistani Taliban, who were pushed over the border into Afghanistan after operations by the Pakistani military, according to military commanders. They are not nearly as capable of pulling off complex attacks as Daesh, as the Islamic State is also called, in Iraq and Syria, according to Brig. Gen. Wilson Shoffner, the military spokesman in Kabul.

“They do not have the ability to orchestrate operations in more than one part of the country at a time,” General Shoffner said this month in a briefing with reporters. “We’re also not seeing what we would consider command-and-control by Daesh elements in Iraq or Syria dictating or orchestrating operations here in Afghanistan.”

Last summer, the group controlled land in at least six provinces across the country, according to the military commanders. But in recent weeks, Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, and American military commanders said that the air campaign and ground operations by Afghan forces have confined the militants to one province.

“We are proud that Afghanistan is the only country where Daesh is on the run,” Mr. Ghani said this month in an address to the Afghan Parliament. “Today, they are fleeing from Nangarhar, and Afghanistan will be their graveyard.”

Along with the airstrikes, American commanders said the Islamic State, which receives little money from outside Afghanistan, has been hurt by the Taliban, as the groups have fought over revenue streams.

“That’s one of the reasons why Daesh has struggled here in Afghanistan, because they are attempting to fund themselves in large part by generating revenue streams within Afghanistan,” General Shoffner said.

A Pentagon spokesman, Jeff Davis, said Friday, “Although considerable challenges remain, the department is confident that the Afghan security forces are continuing to develop the capabilities and capacity to secure the country against a persistent insurgent threat.”

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Steps Up Airstrikes Against ISIS After Group Makes Gains in Afghanistan. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### A Genetic Oddity May Give Octopuses and Squids Their Smarts - The New York Times

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A Genetic Oddity May Give Octopuses and Squids Their Smarts

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A California two-spot octopus. Scientists say coleoid cephalopods, a group encompassing octopuses, squid and cuttlefish, make much more extensive use of RNA editing than other marine and land animals.CreditCreditTom Kleindinst/Marine Biological Laboratory

Coleoid cephalopods, a group encompassing octopuses, squid and cuttlefish, are the most intelligent invertebrates: Octopuses can open jars, squid communicate with their own Morse code and cuttlefish start learning to identify prey when they’re just embryos.

In fact, coleoids are the only “animal lineage that has really achieved behavioral sophistication” other than vertebrates, said Joshua Rosenthal, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. This sophistication could be related to a quirk in how their genes work, according to new research from Dr. Rosenthal and Eli Eisenberg, a biophysicist at Tel Aviv University.

In the journal Cell on Thursday, the scientists reported that octopuses, squid and cuttlefish make extensive use of RNA editing, a genetic process thought to have little functional significance in most other animals, to diversify proteins in their nervous system. And natural selection seems to have favored RNA editing in coleoids, even though it potentially slows the DNA-based evolution that typically helps organisms acquire beneficial adaptations over time.

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A longfin inshore squid. The use of RNA editing by coleoids may contribute to their behavioral complexity.CreditRoger Hanlon/Marine Biological Laboratory

Conventional wisdom says that RNA acts as a messenger, passing instructions from DNA to protein builders in a cell.

But sometimes, enzymes swap out some letters — the ACGU you might have learned about in school — in the RNA’s code for others. When that happens, modified RNA can create proteins that weren’t originally encoded in the DNA, allowing an organism to add new riffs to its base genetic blueprint.

This RNA editing seemed to be happening more in coleoids, so Dr. Eisenberg, Dr. Rosenthal and Noa Liscovitch-Brauer, a postdoctoral scholar at Tel Aviv University, set out to quantify it by looking for disagreements in the DNA and RNA sequences of two octopus, one squid and one cuttlefish species.

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A common cuttlefish. The trade-off of heavy RNA editing is that it may slow DNA-based evolution.CreditRoger Hanlon, Marine Biological Laboratory

They found that coleoids have tens of thousands of so-called recoding sites, where RNA editing results in a protein different from what was initially encoded by DNA. When they applied the same methods to two less sophisticated mollusks — a nautilus and a sea slug — they found that RNA editing levels were orders of magnitude lower.

Next, the researchers compared RNA recoding sites between the octopuses, squid and cuttlefish species and found that they shared tens of thousands of these sites to varying degrees. By comparison, humans and mice share only about 40 recoding sites, even though they are hundreds of millions of years closer in evolution than octopuses and squids.

“Evolutionarily, that’s a big deal,” said Jin Billy Li, an assistant professor of genetics at Stanford, who was not involved in this study. The findings suggest that the editing sites are very important, he added.

Conserving RNA editing sites may have come with an evolutionary trade-off, however. When the researchers looked at the coleoids’ genes, they found that DNA mutations were markedly depleted around recoding sites to help preserve them. The result is a significant portion of the genome “that can’t really evolve fast,” Dr. Rosenthal said.

Slower evolution is a “big price to pay,” Dr. Eisenberg said, because DNA mutations are usually the source of new adaptive traits. But it also suggests the greater ability to edit RNA “must be worth it” in terms of natural selection, he said.

He and Dr. Rosenthal found that RNA editing is enriched in coleoids’ nervous tissues, so they suspect it contributes to these animals’ behavioral complexity, possibly by allowing for dynamic control over proteins in response to different environmental conditions or tasks. Previously, Dr. Rosenthal showed that RNA editing might help octopuses rapidly adapt to temperature changes.

Other organisms use all sorts of different methods to modify their RNA, but the possibility that coleoids use extensive RNA editing to flexibly manipulate their nervous system is “extraordinary,” said Kazuko Nishikura, a professor at the Wistar Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research institute in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the study.

“We may learn a lot from squid and octopus brains,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: Gene Machines: How Cephalopods Got Their Smarts. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### In an Age of Cybercrime, Low-Tech Thieves Target Mailboxes - The New York Times

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In an Age of Cybercrime, Low-Tech Thieves Target Mailboxes

The streets of Upper Manhattan were quiet, but a police officer saw two men standing in front of a blue mailbox at Broadway and Academy Street.

It was around 1:30 a.m., Jan. 17.

One of the men was holding a plastic bottle, which was tied to a string. While his partner stood lookout, the other man lowered the bottle into the mailbox, as if he were feeding a line off a pier, played the string a bit, then pulled it out.

Four pieces of mail were stuck to the bottle.

When the police officer stepped forward, the two men took off, leaving behind the plastic bottle. They were quickly caught. The mail was stuck on the bottle with glue.

“Such devices are commonly used to obtain mail from inside of mailboxes,” Officer Vito Guagenti said in a criminal complaint.

This may be the age of cybercrime, but in some New York neighborhoods crooks are on a spree of fishing old-fashioned snail mail out of street corner mailboxes, using decidedly low-tech tools like plastic bottles, glue and string.

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A message left on a mailbox on Bennett Avenue in Manhattan last month.CreditNikita Stewart/The New York Times

Or, as in another case in Upper Manhattan, a glue trap like those typically used to catch mice.

Some thieves wash the ink off the checks they snare and change the payees’ names. Others make trouble by using the account information.

Over the last year or so, the police and postal inspectors made about 150 arrests in the Bronx on charges of mail fishing, according to Donna Harris, a spokeswoman in New York for the United States Postal Inspection Service.

“We’ve been keeping this low profile,” she said. After realizing that “we weren’t going to arrest our way out of the problem,” Ms. Harris said, the postal authorities started changing the Bronx street mailboxes to make them harder to pilfer.

Like fishing fleets that go where the schools are running, the mail thieves seemed to have pulled anchor in the Bronx and sailed to northern Manhattan. Since October, 14 arrests have been made there, Ms. Harris said.

The crime wave had little chance of staying low profile, thanks to social media and reporting by the news website DNAinfo. Residents have taped warnings on the boxes after finding coatings of glue, or double-side tape.

Laurie Piette was walking her dog one morning in November in the Inwood neighborhood and spotted an envelope addressed to Con Edison that was stuck to a mouse glue trap. The envelope had been torn open, but the return address was legible. She posted an inquiry on Facebook.

Eventually, word got to the sender, Helen M. Churko, who had mailed her Con Edison bill and check a few days earlier.

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A mouse glue trap found in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan had a Con Edison envelope stuck to it.CreditLaurie Piette

A picture of the torn envelope stuck to the mouse glue trap was posted online.

“It was a great photograph,” Ms. Churko said, but shocking. “Literally the minute I stopped getting hysterical, I called my bank and told them what was going on.”

With electronic payment available for many bills, you might think that the pickings would be slim for mailbox thieves. But particularly in parts of Inwood and along Fort Washington Avenue in Washington Heights, older residents are more likely to use checks to pay their bills by mail.

For her part, Ms. Churko said she wrote checks because she was on computers all day at work. “I’m old school when it comes to things like money,” she said. “There are too many stories about cybertheft and identity theft.”

Also, many landlords do not accept electronic payment. A few days into January, Andrew Graham dropped his rent check into a mailbox at Broadway and Dongan Place. He got a call from his bank. Someone had taken the check and written another name over the landlord’s. “Whoever’s committing fraud in this way is really looking for unbanked folks who are mailing out money orders or cash,” he said.

Barbara Kennedy mailed her rent check in a box at Fort Washington Avenue and 183rd Street after the last pickup on Dec. 28. The next morning, she saw the mailbox had been pried open and emptied. She stopped payment. “I put two posts on Facebook to alert people,” Ms. Kennedy said.

People are being advised not to deposit mail after the last pickup of the day or on weekends. “That lets it sit in the box overnight,” said Ms. Harris of the postal inspectors. (She said to report suspicious activity to 212-330-2400 or 911.)

The Police Department also advised using gel ink, which is harder to wash off.

“We’re supposed to write our checks with indelible ink?” Ms. Churko said. “This ticks me off even more.”

Email: dwyer@nytimes.com
Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: In an Age of Cybercrime, Low-Tech Thieves Target Mailboxes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale - The New York Times

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AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale

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The National Security Agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. The agency has gotten access to billions of emails with the cooperation of AT&T.CreditCreditSaul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Julia Angwin, Charlie Savage, Jeff Larson, Henrik Moltke, Laura Poitras and James Risen

The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.

While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed N.S.A. documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the N.S.A. access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.

The N.S.A.’s top-secret budget in 2013 for the AT&T partnership was more than twice that of the next-largest such program, according to the documents. The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency.

One document reminds N.S.A. officials to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities, noting, “This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.”

The documents, provided by the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, were jointly reviewed by The New York Times and ProPublica. The N.S.A., AT&T and Verizon declined to discuss the findings from the files. “We don’t comment on matters of national security,” an AT&T spokesman said.

It is not clear if the programs still operate in the same way today. Since the Snowden revelations set off a global debate over surveillance two years ago, some Silicon Valley technology companies have expressed anger at what they characterize as N.S.A. intrusions and have rolled out new encryption to thwart them. The telecommunications companies have been quieter, though Verizon unsuccessfully challenged a court order for bulk phone records in 2014.

At the same time, the government has been fighting in court to keep the identities of its telecom partners hidden. In a recent case, a group of AT&T customers claimed that the N.S.A.’s tapping of the Internet violated the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches. This year, a federal judge dismissed key portions of the lawsuit after the Obama administration argued that public discussion of its telecom surveillance efforts would reveal state secrets, damaging national security.

The N.S.A. documents do not identify AT&T or other companies by name. Instead, they refer to corporate partnerships run by the agency’s Special Source Operations division using code names. The division is responsible for more than 80 percent of the information the N.S.A. collects, one document states.

Fairview is one of its oldest programs. It began in 1985, the year after antitrust regulators broke up the Ma Bell telephone monopoly and its long-distance division became AT&T Communications. An analysis of the Fairview documents by The Times and ProPublica reveals a constellation of evidence that points to AT&T as that program’s partner. Several former intelligence officials confirmed that finding.

A Fairview fiber-optic cable, damaged in the 2011 earthquake in Japan, was repaired on the same date as a Japanese-American cable operated by AT&T. Fairview documents use technical jargon specific to AT&T. And in 2012, the Fairview program carried out the court order for surveillance on the Internet line, which AT&T provides, serving the United Nations headquarters. (N.S.A. spying on United Nations diplomats has previously been reported, but not the court order or AT&T’s involvement. In October 2013, the United States told the United Nations that it would not monitor its communications.)

The documents also show that another program, code-named Stormbrew, has included Verizon and the former MCI, which Verizon purchased in 2006. One describes a Stormbrew cable landing that is identifiable as one that Verizon operates. Another names a contact person whose LinkedIn profile says he is a longtime Verizon employee with a top-secret clearance.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, AT&T and MCI were instrumental in the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping programs, according to a draft report by the N.S.A.’s inspector general. The report, disclosed by Mr. Snowden and previously published by The Guardian, does not identify the companies by name but describes their market share in numbers that correspond to those two businesses, according to Federal Communications Commission reports.

AT&T began turning over emails and phone calls “within days” after the warrantless surveillance began in October 2001, the report indicated. By contrast, the other company did not start until February 2002, the draft report said.

In September 2003, according to the previously undisclosed N.S.A. documents, AT&T was the first partner to turn on a new collection capability that the N.S.A. said amounted to a “ ‘live’ presence on the global net.” In one of its first months of operation, the Fairview program forwarded to the agency 400 billion Internet metadata records — which include who contacted whom and other details, but not what they said — and was “forwarding more than one million emails a day to the keyword selection system” at the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. Stormbrew was still gearing up to use the new technology, which appeared to process foreign-to-foreign traffic separate from the post-9/11 program.

In 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day to the N.S.A. after “a push to get this flow operational prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11,” according to an internal agency newsletter. This revelation is striking because after Mr. Snowden disclosed the program of collecting the records of Americans’ phone calls, intelligence officials told reporters that, for technical reasons, it consisted mostly of landline phone records.

That year, one slide presentation shows, the N.S.A. spent $188.9 million on the Fairview program, twice the amount spent on Stormbrew, its second-largest corporate program.

After The Times disclosed the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program in December 2005, plaintiffs began trying to sue AT&T and the N.S.A. In a 2006 lawsuit, a retired AT&T technician named Mark Klein claimed that three years earlier, he had seen a secret room in a company building in San Francisco where the N.S.A. had installed equipment.

Mr. Klein claimed that AT&T was providing the N.S.A. with access to Internet traffic that AT&T transmits for other telecom companies. Such cooperative arrangements, known in the industry as “peering,” mean that communications from customers of other companies could end up on AT&T’s network.

After Congress passed a 2008 law legalizing the Bush program and immunizing the telecom companies for their cooperation with it, that lawsuit was thrown out. But the newly disclosed documents show that AT&T has provided access to peering traffic from other companies’ networks.

AT&T’s “corporate relationships provide unique accesses to other telecoms and I.S.P.s,” or Internet service providers, one 2013 N.S.A. document states.

Because of the way the Internet works, intercepting a targeted person’s email requires copying pieces of many other people’s emails, too, and sifting through those pieces. Plaintiffs have been trying without success to get courts to address whether copying and sifting pieces of all those emails violates the Fourth Amendment.

Many privacy advocates have suspected that AT&T was giving the N.S.A. a copy of all Internet data to sift for itself. But one 2012 presentation says the spy agency does not “typically” have “direct access” to telecoms’ hubs. Instead, the telecoms have done the sifting and forwarded messages the government believes it may legally collect.

“Corporate sites are often controlled by the partner, who filters the communications before sending to N.S.A.,” according to the presentation. This system sometimes leads to “delays” when the government sends new instructions, it added.

The companies’ sorting of data has allowed the N.S.A. to bring different surveillance powers to bear. Targeting someone on American soil requires a court order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. When a foreigner abroad is communicating with an American, that law permits the government to target that foreigner without a warrant. When foreigners are messaging other foreigners, that law does not apply and the government can collect such emails in bulk without targeting anyone.

AT&T’s provision of foreign-to-foreign traffic has been particularly important to the N.S.A. because large amounts of the world’s Internet communications travel across American cables. AT&T provided access to the contents of transiting email traffic for years before Verizon began doing so in March 2013, the documents show. They say AT&T gave the N.S.A. access to “massive amounts of data,” and by 2013 the program was processing 60 million foreign-to-foreign emails a day.

Because domestic wiretapping laws do not cover foreign-to-foreign emails, the companies have provided them voluntarily, not in response to court orders, intelligence officials said. But it is not clear whether that remains the case after the post-Snowden upheavals.

“We do not voluntarily provide information to any investigating authorities other than if a person’s life is in danger and time is of the essence,” Brad Burns, an AT&T spokesman, said. He declined to elaborate.

Correction: 

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the number of emails the National Security Agency has gotten access to with the cooperation of AT&T. As the article correctly noted, it is in the billions, not trillions.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Says He’ll Shift Focus to Users’ Privacy - The New York Times

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Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Says He’ll Shift Focus to Users’ Privacy

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Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said he planned to build systems and products that create a type of “digital living room” where people can expect their discussions to be private.CreditCreditEliot Blondet/SIPA, via Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO — Social networking has long been predicated on people sharing their status updates, photos and messages with the world. Now Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, plans to start shifting people toward private conversations and away from public broadcasting.

Mr. Zuckerberg, who runs Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, on Wednesday expressed his intentions to change the essential nature of social media. Instead of encouraging public posts, he said he would focus on private and encrypted communications, in which users message mostly smaller groups of people they know. Unlike publicly shared posts that are kept as users’ permanent records, the communications could also be deleted after a certain period of time.

He said Facebook would achieve the shift partly by integrating Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger so that users worldwide could easily message one another across the networks. In effect, he said, Facebook would change from being a digital town square to creating a type of “digital living room,” where people could expect their discussions to be intimate, ephemeral and secure from outsiders.

“We’re building a foundation for social communication aligned with the direction people increasingly care about: messaging each other privately,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview on Wednesday. In a blog post, he added that as he thought about the future of the internet, “I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms.”

Facebook’s plan — in which the company is playing catch-up to how people are already communicating digitally — raises new questions, not the least of which is whether it can realistically pull off a privacy-focused platform. The Silicon Valley giant, valued at $490 billion, depends on people openly sharing posts to be able to target advertising to them. While the company will not eradicate public sharing, a proliferation of private and secure communications could potentially hurt its business model.

Facebook also faces concerns about what the change means for people’s data and whether it was being anti-competitive by knitting together WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, which historically have been separate and operated autonomously.

Mr. Zuckerberg was vague on many details of the shift, including how long it would take to enact and whether that meant Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger would share user information and other contact details with one another. He did not address how private, encrypted communications would affect Facebook’s bottom line.

But Mr. Zuckerberg did acknowledge the skepticism that Facebook would be able to change. “Frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing,” he wrote in his blog post. “But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.”

Facebook’s move is set to redefine how people use social media and how they will connect with one another. That has societal, political and national security implications given the grip that the company’s services have on more than 2.7 billion users around the world. In some countries, Facebook and its other apps are often considered as being the internet.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s decision follows years of scandal for the social network, much of it originating from public sharing of posts. Foreign agents from countries like Russia have used Facebook to publish disinformation, in an attempt to sway elections. Some communities have used Facebook Groups to strengthen ideologies around issues such as anti-vaccination. And firms have harvested the material that people openly shared for all manner of purposes, including targeting advertising and creating voter profiles.

Even WhatsApp, which has long been encrypted, has grappled with the distribution of misinformation through its service, sometimes with deadly consequences.

All of that has put Facebook in the spotlight, which in turn has badly damaged the company’s reputation and created mistrust with users. Regulators have intensified scrutiny of Facebook’s privacy practices, with the Federal Trade Commission considering a multibillion-dollar fine against the company for violating a 2011 privacy consent decree. Last week, the agency said it would create a task force to monitor big tech companies and potential anti-competitive conduct.

Mr. Zuckerberg has repeatedly tried to rid Facebook of toxic content, disinformation and other problems. At one point, he emphasized prioritizing what friends and family shared on Facebook and de-emphasizing content from publishers and brands. He has also said that the company will hire more people to comb through and remove abusive or dangerous posts, and that it is working on artificial intelligence tools to do that job.

But none of those moves addressed the issue of public sharing. And in many ways, consumers were already moving en masse toward more private methods of digital communications.

Snap, the maker of the Snapchat app, has built a young, loyal audience by allowing people to share messages and stories for a finite period of time, for example. Other companies, like the local social networking company Nextdoor, focus on the power of group and community communications. And closed, private messaging services like Signal and Telegram have also become more prominent.

Evan Spiegel, chief executive of Snap, hinted at the problems that Facebook’s News Feed had created last week at a New York Times conference. Because of the way social networks had been constructed for people to publicly share content, he said, “things that are negative actually spread faster and further than things that are positive.” He later added, “You know, I certainly think there’s a lot of opportunity to sort of course-correct here.”

In many ways, Mr. Zuckerberg is now emulating a strategy popularized by Tencent, the Chinese internet company that makes the messaging app WeChat. WeChat has become the de facto portal to the rest of the internet for Chinese citizens because through the app, users can perform a multitude of tasks, like pay for items, communicate with friends and order takeout.

“Facebook is focused on mobile and messaging as the key conduit for people to communicate online, and thereby to communicate with Facebook,” said Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher who was a former chief technologist at the F.T.C. “The chat app essentially becomes your browser.”

Mr. Zuckerberg said that even though he would focus on private and secure conversations, the public forums for communication popularized by Facebook would continue. In addition, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger will remain stand-alone apps, even as their underlying messaging infrastructures are woven together, The Times previously reported. The work, which will include adding end-to-end encryption across all the apps, is in the early stages.

Mr. Zuckerberg said this overall shift would ultimately create new opportunities for Facebook.

“We’re thinking about private messaging in a way that we can build the tools to make that better,” he said in the interview. “There’s all kinds of different commerce opportunities, especially in developing countries. There’s more private tools to be built around peoples’ location. There’s just a whole set of broader utilities we can build that fit this more intimate mode of sharing.”

Follow Mike Isaac on Twitter: @MikeIsaac.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Users’ Privacy Is New Focus, Facebook Says. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Apple Was Slow to Act on FaceTime Bug That Allows Spying on iPhones - The New York Times

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Apple Was Slow to Act on FaceTime Bug That Allows Spying on iPhones

Image
The FaceTime flaw, dubbed FacePalm, was inadvertently discovered by Grant Thompson, 14, and reported by his mother. Apple didn’t react until an article about it on a fan site went viral.CreditCreditThomas Peter/Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO — On Jan. 19, Grant Thompson, a 14-year-old in Arizona, made an unexpected discovery: Using FaceTime, Apple’s video chatting software, he could eavesdrop on his friend’s phone before his friend had even answered the call.

His mother, Michele Thompson, sent a video of the hack to Apple the next day, warning the company of a “major security flaw” that exposed millions of iPhone users to eavesdropping. When she didn’t hear from Apple Support, she exhausted every other avenue she could, including emailing and faxing Apple’s security team, and posting to Twitter and Facebook. On Friday, Apple’s product security team encouraged Ms. Thompson, a lawyer, to set up a developer account to send a formal bug report.

But it wasn’t until Monday, more than a week after Ms. Thompson first notified Apple of the problem, that Apple raced to disable Group FaceTime and said it was working on a fix. The company reacted after a separate developer reported the FaceTime flaw and it was written about on 9to5mac.com, a news site for Apple fans, in an article that went viral.

The bug, and Apple’s slow response to patching it, have renewed concerns about the company’s commitment to security, even though it regularly advertises its bug reward program and boasts about the safety of its products. Hours before Apple’s statement addressing the bug Monday, Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, tweeted that “we all must insist on action and reform for vital privacy protections.”

The FaceTime problem has already been branded “FacePalm” by security researchers, who say Apple’s security team should have known better. Rarely is there a software flaw that grants such high-level remote access and is so easy to manipulate: By adding a second person to a group FaceTime call, you can capture the audio and video of the first person called before that person answers the phone, or even if the person never answers.

“If these kinds of bugs are slipping through,” said Patrick Wardle, the co-founder of Digita Security, which focuses on Apple-related security, “you have to wonder if there are other problematic bugs that other hackers are exploiting that should have been caught.”

[Read how to disable FaceTime to avoid the eavesdropping bug.]

On Monday, Apple said it was aware of the issue and had “identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week.”

But the company has not addressed how the flaw passed through quality assurance, why it was so slow to respond to Ms. Thompson’s urgent warnings, or whether it intends to reward the teenager whose mother raced to alert the company to the bug in the first place.

A bug this easy to exploit is every company’s worst security nightmare and every spy agency, cybercriminal and stalker’s dream. In emails to Apple’s product security team, Ms. Thompson noted that she and her son were just everyday citizens who believed they had uncovered a flaw that could undermine national security.

“My fear is that this flaw could be used for nefarious purposes,” she wrote in a letter provided to The New York Times. “Although this certainly raises privacy and security issues for private individuals, there is the potential that this could impact national security if, for example, government members were to fall victim to this eavesdropping flaw.”

Image
Apple has disabled Group FaceTime and is working on a fix to be released in a software update this week.CreditAndy Wong/Associated Press

Unknown to Ms. Thompson, there is a healthy market for bugs and the code to weaponize them, which allow governments, defense contractors and cybercriminals to invisibly spy on people’s devices without their knowledge, capturing everything from their locations to information caught on their microphones and cameras. The FaceTime flaw, and other Apple bugs, can fetch tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, from dozens of brokers. Those brokers then sell those bugs for ever higher sums to governments and intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world. On the seedier side of the spectrum are brokers who will sell these tools on the dark web to the highest bidder.

The only catch is that hackers must promise never to disclose the flaw to the vendor for patching, so that buyers can keep their access.

The market for Apple flaws has soared in the post-Edward Snowden era as technology makers include more security, like end-to-end encryption, to thwart would-be spies. This month, Zerodium, a well-known broker and security firm, raised its reward for an Apple iOS bug to $2 million.

In part to compete in that market, and reward those who do right by the company by notifying it of potentially lucrative bugs, Apple announced its own bounty program in 2016 — the last of the Silicon Valley companies to do so.

At a hacker conference that year in Las Vegas, Apple made a surprise announcement: It said it would start paying rewards as high as $200,000 to hackers who responsibly turned over crucial flaws in its products. But the bounty program has been slow going, in part, hackers say, because they can make multiples of that bounty on the black market, and because Apple has taken its time rewarding them for reporting problems.

The FacePalm bug is a particularly egregious case, researchers say, not just because it was discovered by a teenager simply trying to use his phone, but because it allowed full microphone and video access.

“This is a bug that Apple’s Q.A., should have caught,” Mr. Wardle said. “And where there’s smoke, there’s almost always fire.”

Bug brokers say FacePalm, while impressive, would not have brought a top price because it leaves a record of the attack. The flaw works only if you FaceTime the person you want to capture audio and video for, notifying your target of the call.

Bugs that fetch $2 million or $3 million on the black market leave no trace, work more than 99.5 percent of the time and work instantaneously, said Adriel Desautels, the chief executive of Netragard, a company that helps firms protect their software.

In this case, Mr. Desautels said, FacePalm is not as dangerous as a flaw that can covertly track someone’s location, turn on that person’s camera and capture video without a trace.

But, he added, “it’s pretty good for a high schooler.”

Follow Nicole Perlroth on Twitter: @nicoleperlroth.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Warned That iPhone App Could Snoop, Apple Acted Slowly. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### IN SHORT: NONFICTION - The New York Times
About the Archive

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems. Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

December 21, 1986, Page 007015 The New York Times Archives

THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD: The Story of Adnan Khashoggi. By Ronald Kessler. (Warner, $18.95.) ''For the world's richest man, saving the world was the next logical step in his career.''

If that sentence opened a comic novel we could hope to meet someone about to take us on a zany, elliptical, picaresque ride. The line, however, is on the last page of a painfully serious book about Adnan Khashoggi, who has figured in news reports recently as having been involved in the deal that sent arms to Iran for funds for the Nicaraguan contras. His plan for saving the world, starting with the Middle East, is said to be locked in a Swiss bank vault, awaiting approval. The book, by Ronald Kessler, an experienced journalist, is a detailed account, replete with menus, carrots and sticks, of how Mr. Khashoggi has made big, big money brokering deals between the Arab world and the West. But it casts no light on the current scandal (Iran is mentioned only three times, in passing) and not much light on what really makes Mr. Khashoggi tick, if anything, in addition to beautiful women, celebrities, gold-plated plumbing and the like. His family name, of Turkish origin, means ''spoon maker''; his father was a physician to the Saudi royal family; he once met Bebe Rebozo but got no favors from Richard Nixon. He didn't grant the author an interview until the manuscript was finished, so he appears in the text re-created from notes and recollections of others, and seems distant. If Mr. Khashoggi has deep or subtle thoughts they do not appear here. But he has a fair grip on the single entendre: ''Where there is power there is money.''

Continue reading the main story

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#####EOF##### Uproar Over Dissident Rattles Saudi Royal Family - The New York Times

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Uproar Over Dissident Rattles Saudi Royal Family

Image
The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, left, with Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, center, and King Salman. The royal family consists of thousands of descendants of the king who founded the country.CreditCreditBandar Algaloud/Saudi Royal Council, via Getty Images

BEIRUT, Lebanon — As international outrage grew at Saudi Arabia over the apparent killing of the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, an alarmed King Salman dispatched a senior royal to address the matter with Turkey’s president.

Prince Khalid al-Faisal returned home from Ankara with a bleak message for the royal family. “It is really difficult to get out of this one,” Prince Khalid told relatives after his return, one of those family members recalled this week. “He was really disturbed by it.”

Saudi Arabia is facing perhaps its greatest international crisis since the revelation that its citizens planned and carried out the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Members of the ruling family are increasingly worried about the direction of the country under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 33-year-old favorite son of King Salman and the kingdom’s day-to-day ruler.

But unlike 2001, when the royal family came together to protect its collective interests, this time that may not be possible. Instead, there is deep concern, as royals search, so far in vain, for a way to contain the crown prince, who has consolidated power so completely that nearly everyone else is marginalized.

[Jamal Khashoggi is dead. Read an update on what we know so far.]

The one person who could intervene is the king himself, but senior princes have found it nearly impossible to bring their concerns to the 82-year-old monarch, and some doubt he is fully aware of what is happening or willing to change course.

Image
Turkish investigators leaving the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Thursday. The Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi disappeared there Oct. 2.CreditOzan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“The king has no capacity to handle it,” said an employee of a senior prince, speaking on condition of anonymity, like others in this article, because of fear of repercussions.

Speaking of Crown Prince Mohammed, he said, “He is No. 1 and No. 2.”

Since the Saudi state was founded in 1932, the royal family has at times been torn by disagreements, even an assassination. But the thousands of princes and princesses who make up the House of Saud have ultimately found ways to preserve the dynasty. There was simply too much at stake to let family rifts get in the way of lavish lifestyles, exorbitant allowances and unrivaled privileges.

Then came Crown Prince Mohammed — young, brash and eager — who has systematically dismantled the system of consensus that kept the peace for decades.

With all the power in his hands, the crown prince also abandoned the traditional Saudi foreign policy style that used quiet, behind-the-scenes deal-making and checkbook diplomacy. Instead, he moved aggressively, launching a disastrous military intervention in Yemen; kidnapping the Lebanese prime minister; and rupturing relations with Qatar and Canada. Meanwhile, he marketed a new Saudi Arabia abroad in which a dynamic economy would boom and women would drive.

That pitch won over fans who saw him as exactly the kind of leader the kingdom needed to shake off its conservative past. Among those fans was the Trump administration, which made him the pillar of its Middle East policy.

But his rise irked many of his cousins, who now fear the worst as they helplessly watch the kingdom’s reputation become toxic.

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Protesters outside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.CreditOzan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Turkish officials have said a 15-member hit team from Saudi Arabia was waiting for Mr. Khashoggi and dismembered him in the consulate. It seems unlikely that such an operation could have been undertaken without the crown prince’s knowledge.

Such a prospect has created something the prince’s relatives thought they’d never see: a problem they cannot buy their way out of. And none appear willing or able to match the young prince’s Machiavellian tactics.

“They aren’t a particularly draconian bunch,” said another longtime associate of the royal family, describing the philosophy of some princes as, “We just want to eat burgers and go on foreign holidays.”

Associates of the royal family say that senior princes don’t have the access to King Salman that they had to previous kings, making it hard to voice concerns. Some princes cannot enter the royal court or the king’s palace unless their names have been placed at the door ahead of time, one member of the royal family complained.

Otherwise, they see the king at official events where it is considered bad form to raise thorny issues or they visit him at night when he is playing cards, also a bad time for serious talk.

At the same time, Prince Mohammed has been scrambling to mitigate the damage. One Western adviser said that even he had been taken aback by the outrage.

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Prince Mohammed, background, may have monopolized power so fully that there is almost no one left to challenge him.CreditFayez Nureldine/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“He was in real shock at the magnitude of the reaction,” the adviser said.

The palace turmoil has been reflected in Saudi Arabia’s shifting explanations for what happened to Mr. Khashoggi. For weeks, the government officials insisted that he had left the Istanbul consulate shortly after he arrived and that they had no idea of his whereabouts.

Early Saturday, the Saudi state-run news media said that Mr. Khashoggi had been killed in a fistfight in the consulate and that 18 unidentified Saudis were being held in connection with his death. It was the kingdom’s first admission that Mr. Khashoggi was dead.

The crown prince has steadfastly rejected the pleas of Wall Street executives to postpone an investor conference he is scheduled to host next week in Riyadh, even as one after another participant has canceled because of the scandal, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

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Saudi Arabia now suggests that Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident journalist, was the victim of a premeditated killing at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. It’s the latest in a series of shifting explanations from the kingdom.CreditCreditLakruwan Wanniarachchi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Instead, the crown prince formed a crisis committee of representatives of the intelligence agencies, Foreign Ministry and security services to update him throughout the day on the latest in the Khashoggi scandal. He has recalled his younger brother, Prince Khalid bin Salman, the ambassador to Washington, accelerating plans to name him as a kind of national security adviser to bring order to what largely has been an ad hoc policy process.

The royal court has threatened to retaliate against any moves taken against the kingdom, suggesting it might use its influence on the oil markets as leverage over the global economy. One closely allied commentator suggested that sanctions against the kingdom could push it and the Muslim world “into the arms of Iran.”

The terse announcement early Saturday that Mr. Khashoggi died inside the consulate during a fight appeared to be part of a strategy of acknowledging his death but shifting the responsibility away from the crown prince.

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A Saudi official has said Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, a high-ranking adviser to the crown prince, organized the operation that killed the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.CreditCreditHasan Jamali/Associated Press

Officials were known to have been weighing whether to blame Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, the deputy head of intelligence and a confidant of the young prince. People with knowledge of the plan said it would accuse General Assiri of having orchestrated a plot intended to capture Mr. Khashoggi but that it ultimately killed him — an explanation the Saudis hope will help shield the crown prince from further recriminations.

On Saturday, General Assiri was removed from his post, state media reported, along with at least three other high-level officials. It was not made clear whether the dismissals had any connection to the Khashoggi case.

While Saudi Arabia was traditionally ruled by senior princes who divided major portfolios and made big policy decisions by consensus under the king, many of those once-powerful princes have seen their power cut. Some have been removed from prominent posts. Others were locked in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton last year on accusations of corruption made by Crown Prince Mohammed. Still others and their families are banned from travel and too scared they might be arrested to speak up.

Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the previous crown prince and counterterrorism czar, remains under virtual house arrest. He, his wife and their two daughters found out earlier this year that their Saudi bank accounts had been drained, a relative said.

The sons of the former king, Abdullah, who died in 2015, have been neutralized. One was removed as the head of the National Guard, accused of corruption and stripped of assets, including the horse track he inherited from his father. His brother, a former governor of Riyadh, is detained, as is another son of another former king. Yet another brother is hiding out in Europe, scared that he could be kidnapped and sent home.

That leaves only the crown prince’s father, King Salman, to check his power.

“There is one person inside Saudi Arabia who can challenge Mohammed bin Salman, and it is the king,” said Joseph A. Kechichian, a scholar at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh.

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King Salman with Khalid al-Faisal, right. Prince Khalid is among few thought to have the influence that would be required to curb Prince Mohammed’s power.CreditSaudi Royal Court, via Reuters

But the king must consider not only the stain of the Khashoggi issue on his son’s reputation, but also how to continue the reform program known as Vision 2030 that the crown prince has begun, Mr. Kechichian said.

Others question whether the king’s health allows him to grasp all that is happening.

“One worries about the mental state of King Salman,” said Madawi al-Rasheed, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and author of many books on Saudi Arabia. “Is he really in a position to make these decisions at this late age?”

Removing such a powerful crown prince could prove hugely disruptive, and few princes would want the job with a resentful Mohammed bin Salman scheming against his replacement. But one Western diplomat with long experience in the kingdom suggested that the king might check the young prince by reducing his power, perhaps redistributing control of the security services to other respected princes.

“The brand has been irreparably tarnished — domestically they really do need to do something to rein M.B.S. in,” the diplomat said, referring to the crown prince by his initials. “They need to do something to corral him.”

One of the few with the stature to urge the king to make such a shift might be Prince Khalid, who flew to Ankara to see the Turks. A son of the late King Faisal and now governor of Mecca Province, Prince Khalid, 78, is esteemed in the family as measured and intelligent. That the king sent him on such a touchy mission indicates that he already has the monarch’s trust. His half brother, Prince Turki al-Faisal, was a longtime friend and patron of Mr. Khashoggi in the decades when he worked in the Saudi establishment before he turned critical of Crown Prince Mohammed.

Some foes of the crown prince have hoped for a challenge for the throne from the king’s brother, Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz. Prince Ahmed, 73, is the youngest of seven sons of the late King Abdulaziz who all shared the same mother, Hussa bint Ahmed al-Sudairi. The Sudairi seven, as they were known, formed a powerful bloc within the family and passed the throne from brother to brother — a pattern that might have extended to Prince Ahmed if King Salman had not redirected the line of succession to his own son.

So critics of Prince Mohammed were electrified last month when Prince Ahmed addressed protesters on the street in London who were chanting against the royal family over the war in Yemen.

“What does this have to do with the Al Saud?” Prince Ahmed said, in comments caught on video. “Those responsible are the king and his crown prince.”

When asked about the war in Yemen, he replied, “I hope the situation ends, whether in Yemen or elsewhere, today before tomorrow.”

On the internet, critics of the crown prince posted oaths of loyalty to Prince Ahmed, but his turn as an opposition leader did not last long. He soon issued a statement saying his comment had been misinterpreted. He remains in London, afraid to return home.

Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Istanbul. Karam Shoumali contributed reporting from Berlin.

Follow Ben Hubbard on Twitter at @NYTBen.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: For Royal Family, Unease Over Direction of Country Under Crown Prince. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Opinion | Cops, Cellphones and Privacy at the Supreme Court - The New York Times

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Editorial

Cops, Cellphones and Privacy at the Supreme Court

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CreditCreditPieter Van Eenoge

How hard should it be for the police to get hold of reams of data showing every place you’ve been for months?

The Supreme Court will confront that question on Wednesday when it hears oral arguments in one of the biggest Fourth Amendment cases in years.

In 2013, Timothy Carpenter was convicted of being the ringleader behind a series of armed robberies of cellphone stores in and around Detroit, and was sentenced to almost 116 years in prison. His conviction was secured in part based on 127 days of location data that his cellphone service provider turned over to the police, showing that his phone had been in the vicinity of several of the robberies.

The police got those phone records without a warrant, which the Fourth Amendment generally requires, and which would have forced them to show they had probable cause to believe that Mr. Carpenter had committed a crime. Instead they relied on a federal law with a lower standard: “reasonable grounds to believe” that the records “are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Mr. Carpenter appealed his conviction as violating the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. He argues that the police should have to get warrants to collect long-term location data, which reveal a huge amount of private information. As a federal judge in a separate case put it, “A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”

Mr. Carpenter lost in the lower federal courts. They relied on the Supreme Court’s so-called third-party doctrine. It was developed in the 1970s and holds that people have no expectation of privacy when information has been voluntarily shared with a third party, like a cellphone service provider.

As it reaches the high court, the Carpenter case raises two basic questions, one easy and one hard.

First, the easy one: What should the Supreme Court do when a decades-old doctrine from the age of rotary-dial phones and Yellow Pages stops making sense in the face of rapid, unforeseen technological advances?

The answer is to revise it, if not throw it out altogether. Law enforcement authorities have access to a volume and specificity of citizens’ personal information they couldn’t have dreamed of 40 years ago. Since there are almost no limits under federal law, they are taking advantage of this trove. In 2016, Verizon and AT&T received nearly 125,000 requests for cellphone location data, and that will only go up.

On top of that, smartphones have become an indispensable part of our daily lives, and sharing the data they generate automatically with a third party is not a meaningful choice. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a 2012 case, the concept of voluntariness “is ill-suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.” These include “the phone numbers that they dial or text, to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the email addresses with which they correspond, to their internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase, to online retailers.”

The harder question is: What rules should govern the relationship between law enforcement and the public, and who should write them? Even if the Supreme Court decides, as it ought to, that the police needed a warrant to vacuum up four months of Mr. Carpenter’s whereabouts, it can’t resolve more fine-grained questions about how to balance personal privacy against public safety.

That’s a job for lawmakers, said Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University and the author of a book about involving the public in creating law enforcement policies: “How much data can you get? How long can you hold it? Can you share it with other agencies? Do people have a right to know that they’re in it? Does it have to be purged after the investigation is over?

“The Supreme Court doesn’t have a scalpel to write those rules, but that’s what is needed,” Mr. Friedman said.

Several states have passed laws that are more protective of people’s cellphone location data, but Congress has avoided the issue so far. A strong ruling in favor of Mr. Carpenter, Mr. Friedman said, could provide the impetus for a better federal law. “The way that you most effectively get Congress to act is by ruling in a way that someone who can make Congress act has something in the game. Ruling against law enforcement will get them to move.”

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Cops, Cellphones and Privacy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Can Social Media Be Saved? - The New York Times

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The Shift

Can Social Media Be Saved?

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CreditCreditGlenn Harvey

I don’t need to tell you that something is wrong with social media.

You’ve probably experienced it yourself. Maybe it’s the way you feel while scrolling through your Twitter feed — anxious, twitchy, a little world weary — or your unease when you see a child watching YouTube videos, knowing she’s just a few algorithmic nudges away from a rabbit hole filled with lunatic conspiracies and gore. Or maybe it was this month’s Facebook privacy scandal, which reminded you that you’ve entrusted the most intimate parts of your digital life to a profit-maximizing surveillance machine.

Our growing discomfort with our largest social platforms is reflected in polls. One recently conducted by Axios and SurveyMonkey found that all three of the major social media companies — Facebook, Twitter and Google, which shares a parent company with YouTube — are significantly less popular with Americans than they were five months ago. (And Americans might be the lucky ones. Outside the United States, social media is fueling real-world violence and empowering autocrats, often with much less oversight.)

But it would be a mistake to throw up our hands and assume that it has to be this way. The original dream of social media — producing healthy discussions, unlocking new forms of creativity, connecting people to others with similar interests — shouldn’t be discarded because of the failures of the current market leaders. And lots of important things still happen on even the most flawed networks. The West Virginia teachers’ strike and last weekend’s March for Our Lives, for example, were largely organized on Facebook and Twitter.

The primary problem with today’s social networks is that they’re already too big, and are trapped inside a market-based system that forces them to keep growing. Facebook can’t stop monetizing our personal data for the same reason that Starbucks can’t stop selling coffee — it’s the heart of the enterprise.

Many of the fixes being proposed involve regulation. The Honest Ads Act, a bill in the Senate, would require greater transparency for online political ads. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect in May, aims to give users greater control of their digital information trails.

But these efforts don’t touch the underlying problems, and in fact could make it harder for start-ups to compete with the giants.

If we’re really serious about changing how social networks operate, far more radical interventions are required. Here are three possible ways to rescue social media from the market-based pressures that got us here.

In their book “New Power,” which comes out next week, Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms write about the struggle between centralized, top-down institutions, which represent “old power,” and decentralized, bottom-up movements, which represent “new power.”

Facebook, they write, is an example of a new power institution that serves old power interests. It harvests the creative output of billions of people and turns it into a giant, centralized enterprise, with most users sharing none of the economic value they create and getting no say in the platform’s governance.

Instead, the authors ask, what if a social network was truly run by its users?

“If you’re contributing economic value to something of this much social consequence, you should share in the value you’re creating,” Mr. Heimans told me.

Nathan Schneider, a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado, had a similar idea in 2016, when he proposed that Twitter users band together to buy the platform from its shareholders and convert it into a user-run collective, similar to the way a local credit union is run. People who made valuable contributions to the network, such as employees and power users, would receive bigger stakes and more voting power. And users would have a seat at the table for major decisions about the platform’s operations.

It’s exceedingly unlikely that Mark Zuckerberg, who has fought hard to keep control of Facebook, will ever convert the company into a user-owned and run collective. But Mr. Schneider believes that giving more control to responsible users could help restore trust in the network, and signal the kind of values Mr. Zuckerberg says he wants Facebook to represent.

“He could show that he takes democracy seriously enough to start with his own baby,” Mr. Schneider said.

Another radical approach would be to make social networks work more like email — so that independent apps could seamlessly work together with one another, across a common protocol.

Instead of one big Facebook, a federated social network would look like clusters of independent nodes — Mombook and Athletebook and Gamerbook — all of which could be plugged into the umbrella network when it made sense. Rather than requiring a one-size-fits-all set of policies that apply to billions of users, these nodes could be designed to reflect users’ priorities. (A network for privacy hawks and one for open-sharing maximalists could have different data-retention rules, and a network for L.G.B.T. users and one for evangelical pastors could have different hate speech rules.) If a node became too toxic, it could be removed without shutting down the entire network.

“Email is the most resilient social network on the internet,” Mr. Schneider said, “and the thing that allows it to adapt is that it’s an open protocol, and people build apps on top of it, and we evolve how we use it.”

Versions of this kind of network already exist. Mastodon, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, has gotten more than a million registered users since its debut in 2016. And various social networks based on the blockchain — the ledger system that underlies virtual currencies like Bitcoin — have sprung up in recent months.

To be sure, decentralized networks have their own problems. They’re messy to administer, and they can still be gamed by bad actors. They can also fall prey to the same kind of privacy issues that Facebook is being criticized for. (In fact, part of the reason users are angry at Facebook right now is that the company’s data infrastructure was too open, and made it overly simple for third-party app developers to take user information outside Facebook.)

None of this is a panacea. But experimenting with more decentralized models could give social media users a sense that platforms represented their interests, rather than those of a faceless corporation.

A single friend of mine once remarked that the major difference among dating apps like OKCupid, Tinder and Bumble wasn’t the way they were designed or the companies behind them — it was how long they had existed.

New apps, she said, were more likely to attract interesting and smart people who were actually looking for dates. Older apps, by contrast, were eventually overrun with creeps and predators, no matter how well built they were.

A similar theory might apply to social networks. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat all had plenty of issues in their early years, but they were by and large cleaner, with fewer types of exploitation and malicious behavior. Today, the enormous size and influence of these platforms have made them irresistible honey pots for bad actors, and many of our “social graphs” — Facebook’s term for the webs of digital connections we create — are clogged with years’ worth of clutter.

In a blog post last year, the venture capitalist Hunter Walk proposed an interesting idea: a legally mandated “start over” button that, when pressed, would allow users of social networks to delete all their data, clear out their feeds and friend lists, and begin with a fresh account.

I’d go even further, and suggest that social networks give their users an automatic “self-cleaning” option, which would regularly clear their profiles of apps they no longer used, friendships and followers they no longer interacted with, and data they no longer needed to store. If these tools were enabled, users would need to take affirmative action if they didn’t want their information to disappear after a certain number of months or years.

Making social graphs temporary, rather than preserving them forever by default, would undoubtedly be bad for most social networks’ business models. But it could create new and healthy norms around privacy and data hygiene, and it would keep problems from piling up as networks get older and more crowded. It might even recapture some of the magic of the original social networks, when things were fresh and fascinating, and not quite so scary.

Correction: 

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of registered users on Mastodon. It is more than a million, not more than 140,000.

Email Kevin Roose at kevin.roose@nytimes.com, or follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/kevinroose and on Twitter: @kevinroose.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Its Ideals Tainted, Can Social Media Shine Again?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Opinion | Zuckerberg’s So-Called Shift Toward Privacy - The New York Times

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Zuckerberg’s So-Called Shift Toward Privacy

Facebook is happy to protect user data when doing so decreases the company’s civic responsibilities — but not when it threatens advertising revenue.

Zeynep Tufekci

By Zeynep Tufekci

Dr. Tufekci is a professor of information science who specializes in the social effects of technology.

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Cardboard cutouts of Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, were placed outside the Capitol by protesters when he testified there in April 2018.CreditCreditSaul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

I was tempted to roll my eyes on Wednesday when Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, posted a manifesto outlining his plan to make social networking more “privacy-focused” and less about the public disclosure of information.

Why take seriously someone who has repeatedly promised — but seldom delivered — improvements to Facebook’s privacy practices? This is a company, after all, that signed a consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission agreeing to improve how it handles the personal information of its users, after federal regulators filed charges against it for deceiving consumers about their privacy. That was about seven years ago, and it has been one scandal after another since.

But I don’t believe in cynicism: Things can get better if we want them to — through regulatory oversight and political pressure. That said, I also don’t believe in being a sucker. So I read Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan with a keen eye on distinguishing meaningful changes from mere platitudes and evasions.

The platitudes were there, as I expected, but the evasions were worse than I anticipated: The plan, in effect, is to entrench Facebook’s interests while sidestepping all the important issues.

Here are four pressing questions about privacy that Mr. Zuckerberg conspicuously did not address: Will Facebook stop collecting data about people’s browsing behavior, which it does extensively? Will it stop purchasing information from data brokers who collect or “scrape” vast amounts of data about billions of people, often including information related to our health and finances? Will it stop creating “shadow profiles” — collections of data about people who aren’t even on Facebook? And most important: Will it change its fundamental business model, which is based on charging advertisers to take advantage of this widespread surveillance to “micro-target” consumers?

Until Mr. Zuckerberg gives us satisfying answers to those questions, any effort to make Facebook truly “privacy-focused” is sure to disappoint.

Most of Mr. Zuckerberg’s post was devoted to acknowledging familiar realities about social media and citing familiar solutions. He noted that Facebook’s users don’t want to be pushed to be so public; they mostly want to keep in touch with people close to them, often using several of the company’s other services: Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. He also noted that users are hungry for less permanent communication features devised by other companies. So Facebook will continue to emulate Snapchat’s ephemeral messaging.

To be fair, there were some genuinely new announcements. For instance, Mr. Zuckerberg said that the company would expand end-to-end encryption of messaging, which prevents Facebook — or anyone other than the participants in a conversation — from seeing the content of messages. I’m certainly in favor of messaging privacy: It is a cornerstone of the effort to push back against the cloud of surveillance that has descended over the globe.

But what we really need — and it is not clear what Facebook has in mind — is privacy for true person-to-person messaging apps, not messaging apps that also allow for secure mass messaging.

At the moment, critics can (and have) held Facebook accountable for its failure to adequately moderate the content it disseminates — allowing for hate speech, vaccine misinformation, fake news and so on. Once end-to-end encryption is put in place, Facebook can wash its hands of the content. We don’t want to end up with all the same problems we now have with viral content online — only with less visibility and nobody to hold responsible for it.

It’s also worth noting that encrypted messaging, in addition to releasing Facebook from the obligation to moderate content, wouldn’t interfere with the surveillance that Facebook conducts for the benefit of advertisers. As Mr. Zuckerberg admitted in an interview after he posted his plan, Facebook isn’t “really using the content of messages to target ads today anyway.” In other words, he is happy to bolster privacy when doing so would decrease Facebook’s responsibilities, but not when doing so would decrease its advertising revenue.

Another point that Mr. Zuckerberg emphasized in his post was his intention to make Facebook’s messaging platforms, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, “interoperable.” He described this decision as part of his “privacy-focused vision,” though it is not clear how doing so — which would presumably involve sharing user data — would serve privacy interests.

Merging those apps just might, however, serve Facebook’s interest in avoiding antitrust remedies. Just as regulators are realizing that allowing Facebook to gobble up all its competitors (including WhatsApp and Instagram) may have been a mistake, Mr. Zuckerberg decides to scramble the eggs to make them harder to separate into independent entities. What a coincidence.

In short, the few genuinely new steps that Mr. Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday seem all too conveniently aligned with Facebook’s needs, whether they concern government regulation, public scandal or profitability. This supposed shift toward a “privacy-focused vision” looks more to me like shrewd competitive positioning, dressed up in privacy rhetoric.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, likes to say that the company’s problem is that it has been “way too idealistic.” I think the problem is the invasive way it makes its money and its lack of meaningful oversight. Until those things change, I don’t expect any shift by the company toward privacy to matter much.

Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, the author of “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest” and a contributing opinion writer.

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: Zuckerberg’s So-Called Focus on Privacy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Devices Banned on Flights From 10 Countries Over ISIS Fears - The New York Times

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Devices Banned on Flights From 10 Countries Over ISIS Fears

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An Emirates plane at the Dubai airport in the United Arab Emirates.CreditCreditUllstein Bild, via Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Intelligence showing that the Islamic State is developing a bomb hidden in portable electronics spurred the United States and Britain on Tuesday to bar passengers from airports in a total of 10 Muslim-majority countries from carrying laptop computers, iPads and other devices larger than a cellphone aboard direct inbound flights, two senior American counterterrorism officials said.

Two additional American officials said the explosives were designed to be hidden in laptop batteries. All four spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to publicly discuss the sensitive information.

The Trump administration maintained that the new restrictions did not signal a credible, specific threat of an imminent attack. Officials said the alert reflects concerns that the Islamic State is ready — or soon will be — to launch new capabilities against the West. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, declined to address the intelligence during a news media briefing on Tuesday.

Officials said passengers still could carry cellphones and other small devices into the airplane’s cabin, while larger items like laptops would have to be stowed with checked luggage.

In all, airports in 10 countries, stretching from North Africa to the Mideast and into Turkey, are affected by the new restrictions. Both the United States and Britain have imposed the ban on flights from some airports in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Washington also has restricted some flights from Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. London, meanwhile, has additionally restricted flights from some airports in Lebanon and Tunisia.

The targeting of a jetliner using explosives shows how the Islamic State, which has long worked to inspire terrorist attacks, is trying to compete with groups like Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. The Qaeda affiliate has spent years inventing explosives that are difficult to detect, including trying to disguise bombs in devices like cellphones. Now, American intelligence officials believe the Islamic State has also developed explosives that can be hidden in electronic devices, one of the senior counterterror officials said.

Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, who sits on the House Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees, said that government officials had called him on Saturday to alert him to the impending ban.

“It was based on intelligence reports that are fairly recent,” Mr. King said in a telephone interview. “Intelligence of something possibly planned.”

The Department of Homeland Security said the restricted items on flights to the United States included laptop computers, tablets, cameras, travel printers and games bigger than a phone. The restrictions would not apply to aircraft crews, officials said in a briefing to reporters to outline the terms of the ban.

The American ban on electronics applies only to flights on foreign carriers. It does not affect American-operated airlines, since they do not fly directly to the United States from 10 designated airports in eight countries — Amman, Jordan; Cairo; Istanbul; Jidda and Riyadh in Saudi Arabia; Kuwait City; Casablanca, Morocco; Doha, Qatar; and Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Officials did not say how long the ban would remain in place or if other airports would be added.

In all, an estimated 50 flights each day into the United States would be affected. One of the world’s busiest airports, in Abu Dhabi, already requires American-bound passengers to undergo strict screening by United States customs officials before boarding flights. Abu Dhabi is one of 15 airports in the world to employ the Homeland Security preclearance techniques.

Several hours after the American action, the British government announced its own ban on electronic devices on flights.

The British ban affects domestic and foreign airlines, including British Airways, the country’s largest. Foreign airlines affected by the order include Turkish Airlines, EgyptAir and Royal Jordanian, among others, and it affects direct flights to the United Kingdom from Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia.

A British official said the U.K. ban resulted from the combination of an evolving threat picture and a proliferation of electronic devices that airline passengers carry on board.

Examples of attacks by extremist groups against transportation hubs over the past two years include the October 2015 bombing of an airliner in Egypt, the attempted airliner downing in Somalia last year and armed attacks against airports in Brussels and Istanbul in 2016.

The new bans on electronic devices have prompted a round of protests from passengers who now face the prospect of flying long hours without the use of laptops or tablets.

Banu Akdenizli, an associate professor of communication at Northwestern University’s campus in Doha, complained that the ban would affect her ability to work during a long flight to Greensboro, N.C., for a conference in April.

“This is a 20-hour flight,” she said. “I think as an academic or any business traveler, the function of a work flight is to be able to work on it, especially if you’re going to a conference.”

Osama Sharshar, a prominent Egyptian lawmaker and journalist who frequently travels to the United States, was critical of the changes and suggested President Trump issued the order simply to “please the right-wing extremists in America.”

“It will terribly affect me as a journalist, a lawmaker and a regular Egyptian,” he said. “I work on planes all the time. And the flight to the States is very long.”

The Homeland Security Department’s new ban appeared to take officials from some of the affected countries by surprise.

Ahmet Arslan, Turkey’s transport, maritime and communication minister, said the ban would be harmful to the United States’ airline industry — and to Turkey’s.

“Our problem is not how the practice would take place,” Mr. Arslan said. “The issue is, it can decrease the comfort of the passengers and reduce the numbers of passengers. We are emphasizing that this is not in the benefit of passengers, and we think that they should step back from this or ease it.”

Counterterrorism experts seemed equally divided over the need for the device ban.

Michael Chertoff, the former Homeland Security secretary, said the new policy made sense given the threats to aircraft from explosive devices and concerns about screening at the targeted airports.

“The challenge is to balance security without making it impossible to fly,” Mr. Chertoff said.

But Erroll Southers, director of the Homegrown Violent Extremism Studies Program at the University of Southern California, said the new guidance would do little to enhance security.

“This does little to minimize the threat of a remote-controlled I.E.D.,” he said, referring to improvised explosive devices hidden in checked baggage.

American intelligence officials did not cite threats against domestic airports, but one said the Transportation Security Administration has been on heightened alert at several airports. It was not clear if that alert was related to the new restrictions on electronic devices.

The restrictions follow other recent changes the T.S.A. has made in aviation security. Two weeks ago, the agency adopted enhanced pat-down searches for passengers at United States airports, a response to what it said were weaknesses in airport screening measures. Under the new rules, passengers will no longer be allowed to choose what type of searches they undergo in security lines.

Correction: 

An earlier version of this article misidentified an airport subject to the new policy that is one of 15 in the world that employs the Homeland Security preclearance techniques. It is Abu Dhabi International Airport, not Dubai International Airport. The error was repeated in a picture caption.

Reporting was contributed by Katrin Bennhold and Amie Tsang in London, Adam Goldman in Washington and Nour Youssef in Cairo.

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Devices Banned on Some Planes Over ISIS Fears. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### For Khashoggi, a Tangled Mix of Royal Service and Islamist Sympathies - The New York Times

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For Khashoggi, a Tangled Mix of Royal Service and Islamist Sympathies

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The Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Saturday. Jamal Khashoggi was last seen entering the building on Oct. 2.CreditCreditPetros Giannakouris/Associated Press

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Jamal Khashoggi landed in Washington last fall, leaving behind a long list of bad news back home.

After a successful career as an adviser to and unofficial spokesman for the royal family of Saudi Arabia, he had been barred from writing in the kingdom, even on Twitter, by the new crown prince. His column in a Saudi-owned Arab newspaper was canceled. His marriage was collapsing. His relatives had been forbidden to travel to pressure him to stop criticizing the kingdom’s rulers.

Then, after he arrived in the United States, a wave of arrests put a number of his Saudi friends behind bars, and he made his difficult decision: It was too dangerous to return home anytime soon — and maybe forever.

So in the United States, he reinvented himself as a critic, contributing columns to The Washington Post and believing he had found safety in the West.

But as it turned out, the West’s protection extended only so far.

Mr. Khashoggi was last seen on Oct. 2 entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where he needed to pick up a document for his wedding. There, Turkish officials say, a team of Saudi agents killed and dismembered him.

Saudi officials have denied harming Mr. Khashoggi, but nearly two weeks after his disappearance, they have failed to provide evidence that he left the consulate and have offered no credible account of what happened to him.

His disappearance has opened a rift between Washington and Saudi Arabia, the chief Arab ally of the Trump administration. And it has badly damaged the reputation of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 33-year-old power behind the Saudi throne, who this time may have gone too far for even for his staunchest supporters in the West.

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A still from security-camera footage that is thought to show Mr. Khashoggi entering the consulate.CreditHurriyet, via Associated Press

The possibility that the young prince ordered a hit on a dissident poses challenges for President Trump and may turn once warm relationships toxic. It could convince those governments and corporations that had overlooked the prince’s destructive military campaign in Yemen, his kidnapping of the Lebanese prime minister and his waves of arrests of clerics, businessmen and fellow princes that he is a ruthless autocrat who will stop at nothing to get his enemies.

While the disappearance has cast a harsh new light on the crown prince, it has also brought attention to the tangled sympathies throughout Mr. Khashoggi’s career, where he balanced what appears to have been a private affinity for democracy and political Islam with his long service to the royal family.

His attraction to political Islam helped him forge a personal bond with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who is now demanding that Saudi Arabia explain his friend’s fate.

The idea of self-exile in the West was a blow for Mr. Khashoggi, 60, who had worked as a reporter, commentator and editor to become one of the kingdom’s best known personalities. He first drew international attention for interviewing a young Osama bin Laden and later became well-known as a confidant of kings and princes.

His career left him extraordinarily well-connected, and the tall, gregarious, easygoing man seemed to know everyone who had anything to do with Saudi Arabia over the last three decades.

But settling in Washington had advantages. A friend invited him for Thanksgiving last year and he shared a photo of himself at dinner with his 1.7 million Twitter followers, tucking into turkey and yams.

When his turn came to share what he was thankful for, he said: “Because I have become free, and I can write freely.”

According to interviews with dozens of people who knew Mr. Khashoggi and his relationship with the Saudi leadership, it was his penchant for writing freely, and his organizing to push for political reform from abroad, that put him on a collision course with the crown prince.

While Saudi Arabia has long been ruled according to the consensus of senior princes, Crown Prince Mohammed has dismantled that system, leaving his own power largely unchecked. If a decision was taken to silence a perceived traitor, it likely would have been his.

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In Afghanistan in the 1980s, Mr. Khashoggi had his photo taken holding an assault rifle, much to his editors’ chagrin. But it does not appear that he fought there.

Mr. Khashoggi’s first claim to fame was his acquaintance with Osama bin Laden. Mr. Khashoggi had spent time in Jidda, Bin Laden’s hometown, and, like Bin Laden, he came from a prominent nonroyal family. Mr. Khashoggi’s grandfather was a doctor who had treated Saudi Arabia’s first king. His uncle was Adnan Khashoggi, a famous arms dealer, although Jamal Khashoggi did not benefit from his uncle’s wealth.

Mr. Khashoggi studied at Indiana State University and returned to Saudi Arabia to report for an English-language newspaper. Several of his friends say that early on Mr. Khashoggi also joined the Muslim Brotherhood.

Although he later stopped attending meetings of the Brotherhood, he remained conversant in its conservative, Islamist and often anti-Western rhetoric, which he could deploy or hide depending on whom he was seeking to befriend.

His newspaper colleagues recalled him as friendly, thoughtful and devout. He often led communal prayers in the newsroom, recalled Shahid Raza Burney, an Indian editor who worked with him.

Like many Saudis in the 1980s, Mr. Khashoggi cheered for the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which was supported by the C.I.A. and Saudi Arabia. So when he got an invitation to see it for himself from another young Saudi, Bin Laden, Mr. Khashoggi jumped at the chance.

In Afghanistan, Mr. Khashoggi wore local dress and had his photo taken holding an assault rifle, much to his editors’ chagrin. But it does not appear that he actually fought while on assignment there.

“He was there as a journalist first and foremost, admittedly as someone sympathetic to the Afghan jihad, but so were most Arab journalists at the time — and many Western journalists,” said Thomas Hegghammer, a Norwegian researcher who interviewed Mr. Khashoggi about his time in Afghanistan.

His colleagues concurred.

“To say that Jamal was some kind of an extremist is all lies,” said Mr. Burney, now a newspaper editor in India.

But the war’s failure to put Afghanistan on sound footing haunted Mr. Khashoggi, as did Bin Laden’s later turn to terrorism.

“He was disappointed that after all that struggle, the Afghans never got together,” said a Saudi friend of Mr. Khashoggi’s who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Mr. Khashoggi’s trips to Afghanistan and his relationship with Prince Turki al-Faisal, who headed Saudi intelligence, made some of Mr. Khashoggi’s friends suspect he was also spying for the Saudi government.

Years later, after American commandos killed Bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, Mr. Khashoggi mourned his old acquaintance and what he had become.

“I collapsed crying a while ago, heartbroken for you Abu Abdullah,” Mr. Khashoggi wrote on Twitter, using Bin Laden’s nickname. “You were beautiful and brave in those beautiful days in Afghanistan, before you surrendered to hatred and passion.”

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Members of the Turkish Human Rights Association demonstrating in front of the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last week.CreditErdem Sahin/EPA, via Shutterstock

As his journalism career took off, Mr. Khashoggi reported from Algeria and drove into Kuwait during the first Gulf War. He climbed the ladder of the kingdom’s media world, where princes own newspapers, content is censored and scandals involving royals are buried.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he blasted the conspiracy theories common in the Arab world, writing that the hijacked planes “also attacked Islam as a faith and the values of tolerance and coexistence that it preaches.”

He was named editor of the Saudi newspaper Al Watan in 2003, but fired less than two months later over an article blaming an esteemed Islamic scholar for teachings used to justify attacks on non-Muslims. He was reinstated in 2007 and lasted a bit longer in his second tenure.

He traveled with King Abdullah and grew close to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the billionaire investor, who was later arrested by Crown Prince Mohammed. Prince Turki, the former intelligence chief, hired Mr. Khashoggi as an adviser when he served as ambassador to Britain and the United States.

It was during his time there that Mr. Khashoggi bought the condo in McLean, Va., where he would live after fleeing the kingdom.

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Friends of Mr. Khashoggi appeared on a TV show last week with a photo of him.CreditMucahid Yapici/Associated Press

Many of Mr. Khashoggi’s friends say that throughout his career of service to the monarchy, he hid his personal leanings in favor of both electoral democracy and Muslim Brotherhood-style political Islam.

When a military coup in Algeria in 1992 dashed the hopes of an Islamist political party to win control of the Parliament there, Mr. Khashoggi quietly teamed up with an Islamist friend in London to start an organization called “The Friends of Democracy in Algeria.”

The group took out advertisements in newspapers in Britain before its parliamentary elections that read, “When you go to cast your vote, remember that this is a bounty many people around the world are denied, including Algerians,” recalled his friend, Azzam Tamimi, who acted as the public face of the effort and hid Mr. Khashoggi’s role.

By the time he reached his 50s, Mr. Khashoggi’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood was ambiguous. Several Muslim Brothers said this week that they always felt he was with them. Many of his secular friends would not have believed it.

Mr. Khashoggi never called for more than gradual reforms to the Saudi monarchy, eventually supporting its military interventions to deter what the Saudis considered Iranian influence in Bahrain and Yemen. But he was enthusiastic about the uprisings that broke out across much of the Arab world in 2011.

Like the Afghan jihad before them, however, the movements of the Arab Spring disappointed him as they collapsed into violence and as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates used their wealth to crush opposition and bolster autocrats.

“He never liked that Saudi Arabia used their policies accelerating the crackdown around the region,” said Sigurd Neubauer, a Middle East analyst in Washington who knew Mr. Khashoggi.

The kingdom’s tolerance for even minimal criticism faded after King Salman ascended to the throne in 2015 and gave tremendous power to his son, Mohammed, the crown prince known informally by his initials as M.B.S.

The young prince announced a program to diversify the economy and loosened social structures, including by granting women the right to drive.

Mr. Khashoggi applauded those moves, but chafed at the authoritarian way the prince wielded power. When Mr. Khashoggi criticized Mr. Trump after his election, for example, Saudi officials forbade him to speak, fearing he would harm their relationship with the new administration.

Crown Prince Mohammed went after his critics with all his power, barring them from travel and throwing some in jail. Mr. Khashoggi left the kingdom last year, before scores of his friends were rounded up and hundreds of prominent Saudis were locked in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton on accusations of corruption. A number of them, including at least two sons of former kings, are still detained.

Mr. Khashoggi began contributing columns to The Washington Post, comparing Crown Prince Mohammed to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Khashoggi’s friends assumed such writing landed him on the prince’s blacklist.

“Mohammed bin Salman had been paying millions of dollars to create a certain image of himself, and Jamal Khashoggi was destroying all of it with just a few words,” said Mr. Tamimi, the friend. “The crown prince must have been furious.”

But Mr. Khashoggi didn’t stop.

He was planning to start a website to publish translated reports about the economies of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, where he felt many people did not understand the scale of corruption or the limited future of the oil wealth.

He was also founding an organization called Democracy in the Arab World Now, or DAWN, an advocacy group. Mr. Khashoggi was trying to secure funding and set up a board when he disappeared, friends said.

Receiving an award in April from the Islamist-leaning Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, Mr. Khashoggi said democracy was under attack across the Arab world by radical Islamists, authoritarians and elites who feared that popular participation would bring chaos. Power sharing, he said, was the only way to stop civil wars and ensure better governance.

Crown Prince Mohammed “is investing hundreds of billions of dollars into future projects and he’s doing that depending on his own ability to judge and the ability of a small circle of advisers,” Mr. Khashoggi said. “Is that enough? No, it is not enough.”

Since his move to Washington, representatives of Crown Prince Mohammed had contacted him repeatedly, asking him to tone down his criticisms and inviting him to come home, he told friends.

But he was building a new life. He and a Turkish researcher, Hatice Cengiz, had decided to marry and set up a new home in Istanbul.

Maggie Mitchell Salem, a longtime friend, worried about him and asked him to text her whenever he went to the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

“He laughed at me: ‘Oh, Maggie, Maggie, you are ridiculous’,” she recalled.

Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut and David D. Kirkpatrick from Istanbul. Julian Barnes, Sharon LaFraniere, Edward Wong and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington, and Karam Shoumali from Berlin.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: For Khashoggi, a Mix of Royal Service and Islamist Sympathies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Dance - The New York Times

Arts

Dance

Highlights

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      CreditEstate of George Platt Lynes, via David Zwirner

      Lincoln Kirstein: A Modern Tastemaker With Some Iffy Taste

      An art critic and dance critic talk about two Kirstein shows — and how his protean diversity left its mark on the arts, most productively on ballet.

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      Critic’s Pick

      Review: Michelle Dorrance Happily Shares the Spotlight

      In a stellar season at New York City Center, Ms. Dorrance’s tap troupe performed dances not only by her, but also by Brenda Bufalino and Bill Irwin.

#SpeakingInDance

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    CreditAlina Rancier for The New York Times

    Tapping, Flying and Riffing, Dorrance Style

    This ensemble section comes toward the end of Michelle Dorrance’s “SOUNDspace,” part of Dorrance Dance’s program at City Center.

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    CreditRudolf Costin for The New York Times

    Hats Off to Ballet Hispánico’s Women

    Originally created for male dancers, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s “Sombrerísimo” is now being performed by the company’s women.

  3. Photo
    CreditDonavon Smallwood for The New York Times

    Netta Yerushalmy’s Rites of Modern Dance

    Her project “Paramodernities” — an ambitious deconstruction of works by six canonical moderns — features this reimagined version of Nijinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”

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    The Freedom of Letting Your Hair Go

    Okwui Okpokwasili’s “Adaku’s Revolt,” a work for young audiences, focuses on a girl who challenges conventional beauty standards by choosing natural hair.

  5. Photo
    CreditMohamed Sadek for The New York Times

    Practice Makes Less Impossible

    “It’s pretty scary”: Melissa Toogood and American Ballet Theater’s Calvin Royal III dance a difficult duet from Merce Cunningham’s “Scenario.”

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#####EOF##### Security of Self-Selected PINs Is Lacking - The New York Times

Security of Self-Selected PINs Is Lacking


Weak PIN codes, like a birth date or a simple string of numbers like “1111” or “1234” are a notorious vulnerability of banking cards. Now a group of British computer security researchers have collected data to show just how vulnerable they actually are.

A Cambridge University Computer Laboratory team collected statistics on how people choose banking PINs when they are permitted to select their own keys. The risk is that a thief who steals a wallet can then try to siphon money from a bank account by guessing the password, often with the aid of personal identification information like the birth date found in the wallet.

“A thief can expect to get lucky every 18th wallet — except for those banks which negligently allow their customers to choose really dumb PINs like 1111 and 1234,” said Ross Anderson, a Cambridge computer scientist. “There the thief cashes out once every 11 wallets.”

The researchers describing the criminal practice of guessing PIN numbers from stolen bank cards as “jackpotting.”

“There is every incentive for the bad guys to try guessing PINs on every card that they steal,” Dr. Anderson said. “There will be a certain percentage that will be guessed, particularly if a bank allows its customers to choose PINs.”

The researchers’ conclusions were not entirely bleak, however. They concluded that user choices of banking PINs were not as weak as with other security codes like passwords. Moreover, they also found that there were lower rates of reuse and sharing of PIN numbers than was frequently the case with passwords.

The group based its analysis on data from a trove of 32 million passwords stolen and then made public from the RockYou social gaming Web site in 2009 and a smaller database of iPhone log-in sequences, as well as an online survey conducted with more than 1,100 Internet users.

In a further experiment performed on the street with a BBC camera crew, the researchers took a sheet of paper with a list of common passwords on it and stopped passers-by to ask them if their PINs were on the list, or if they used date of birth as a PIN.

“It wasn’t a scientific experiment, but we got five out of 20 people,” said Joseph Bonneau, a member of the research group. “I was actually shocked.”

Shorter sequences and user-chosen passwords are more vulnerable. The researchers found that in the United States and in Europe different banks had different practices on what kinds of PINs were permitted. “In the U.S.A., we found that Bank of America and Wells Fargo let customers choose dumb PINs, while Citibank doesn’t,” Dr. Anderson said. “This side of the pond, there’s also diversity. Lloyds and the Co-op let you choose anything while Barclays, RBS and HSBC don’t.”

Their report, which will be presented later this month at a financial security conference, traces an idiosyncratic history of the use of passwords by financial institutions. “In the context of banking, PINs first appeared in separate British cash machines deployed in 1967, with six-digit PINs in the Barclays-De La Rue system rolled out in June, and four-digit PINs in the National-Chubb system in September,” the researchers write. “According to John Shepherd-Barron, leader of the De La Rue engineering team, after his wife was unable to remember six random digits he reduced the length to four.”

The authors note that because of ambiguous international standards, “PIN requirements vary significantly but the minimal four-digit length predominates.” There are, however, areas of the world where PINs that are longer than four digits are required. Moreover, while most banks allow user-defined PINs, there are exceptions, like banks in Germany.

The researchers wrote that there were two lessons to be drawn from their study. First, customers should never use date of birth as a PIN or password. Second, banks should institute blacklists of common passwords, or prohibit user selection of passwords entirely.

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#####EOF##### Travel - The New York Times

Travel

Highlights

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    CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

    Plan a Careful Budget, Then Get Ready to Splurge

    Even the most budget-conscious travelers have one thing they are willing to spend big on, from nonstop flights to luxurious hotel rooms to a black car waiting at the airport.

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    Vietnam’s Empty Forests

    The Asian nation is a hot spot of biological diversity, but local and international conservation groups are struggling to halt what amounts to animal genocide.

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    36 Hours

    36 Hours in Rio de Janeiro

    A weekend in this ever-surprising Brazilian city might include caipirinhas on the beach; capuchin monkeys on a hike; and music, food and history everywhere.

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    Adventurous. Alone. Attacked.

    The number of female solo travelers has skyrocketed, but amid Instagram-worthy escapades are tales of violence and death, raising questions about how the world is greeting women who travel alone.

Top Destinations

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    A 7-Hour, 6-Mile, Round-the-Museum Tour of the Prado

    On the year of the Madrid museum’s bicentennial, our writer visits every gallery, vestibule and passageway to see if he had missed anything on his previous 200 visits. He had.

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    Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Enduring San Francisco

    The writer and bookstore founder’s upcoming 100th birthday is the perfect reason to take a tour of old-school San Francisco, with an emphasis on the Beats’ legacy.

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    Five Places to Eat in the Dolomites

    Massimo Bottura, the chef of the world’s top-rated restaurant, doesn’t ski, but he has a deep passion for the Italian Alps’ hearty (and sometimes arty) fare.

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    In Praise of Pioneer Women and Rocket Scientists

    Huntsville, Alabama and the state of Wyoming are both gearing up to mark major milestones, but where one is an outright celebration, the other is a call to action.

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    Time Traveling Through Las Vegas

    In a city always looking for the next thing, the 52 Places Traveler finds some magic when he takes a look back.

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    The Disappeared Children of Israel

    In the state of Israel’s early years, a number of parents in immigrant transit camps were told that their babies had died. Their families believe the babies were abducted by the Israeli authorities in the 1950s, and were illegally put up for adoption to childless Ashkenazi families, Jews of European descent. A younger generation is demanding answers.

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    How My Southeast L.A. Culture Got to Japan

    I grew up with Chicano and Chicana culture in Los Angeles and heard it had spread to Japan. I wondered: Is this cultural appropriation?

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    In Britain, Enraptured by the Wild, Lonely and Remote

    Rustic shelters called bothies — more than 100 of which are scattered throughout England, Wales and Scotland — are an indispensable, if little-known, element of British hill culture.

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    Surfing Remade in the Rockaways

    The Rockaways’ surf scene comes to reflect the area’s diversity and its history.

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    How Meditation Can Improve Your Travels

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#####EOF##### Opinion | Don’t Delete Facebook. Do Something About It. - The New York Times

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Opinion

Don’t Delete Facebook. Do Something About It.

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

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CreditCreditJosh Edelson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On March 16, as the buzzer sounded in perhaps the worst upset in N.C.A.A. tournament history, and my beloved University of Virginia went down to the 16th-seeded University of Maryland, Baltimore County, I had one thought: I need to deactivate my Facebook account. I did not want to endure the taunts and trash talk of my friends who cheer for Duke.

I do this often. When I need to focus on a project or relax a bit, I turn off the noise that comes from Facebook — the constant stream of disturbing faces, angry comments and shallow pulls on my precious attention. I also lose the lovely pictures of puppies and babies. But sometimes it’s worth it to retreat from the addictive torrent of stimuli framed in blue.

If you feel the same way about how Facebook affects your daily life, by all means suspend or even delete your account (not that Facebook makes it easy to). But don’t pretend it will make a difference to Facebook or to the state of the world.

A Twitter movement known as #DeleteFacebook is motivated by the stream of terrible things that Facebook has been involved in, including the proliferation of hate speech, harassment and propaganda meant to undermine trust in democratic institutions. The final spark was the news that the British political data firm Cambridge Analytica had acquired Facebook data on 50 million Americans.

But even if tens of thousands of Americans quit Facebook tomorrow, the company would barely feel it. Facebook has more than 2.1 billion users worldwide. Its growth has plateaued in the United States, but the service is gaining millions of new users outside North America every week. Like most global companies, Facebook focuses its attention on markets like India, Egypt, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil and Mexico. At current rates of growth, it could reach three billion users by 2020.

[Read more on how to delete Facebook and Instagram.]

People in those countries are getting value out of Facebook; in some places, it’s one of the few reliable ways to keep in touch. In much of the developing world, Facebook is also the only news source that matters. This should horrify us. But it’s not a problem that will be solved by indignant Americans leaving the service.

Moreover, quitting Facebook lets Google and Twitter off the hook. It lets AT&T and Comcast and its peers off the hook. The dangers of extremist propaganda and hate speech are just as grave on YouTube, which is owned by Google. Russian agents undermining trust in institutions and democracy are even more visible on Twitter. And every major telecommunications firm, as well as Google and Twitter, relies on surveillance systems similar to the one Facebook uses to run targeted advertising. Facebook is bigger and better at all of this than the others, but its problems are not unique.

Facebook’s problems are not peripheral, not just some rough edges that can be sanded down. Its core functions are to deploy its algorithms to amplify content that generates strong emotional responses among its users, and then convert what it learns about our interests and desires into targeted ads. This is what makes Facebook Facebook. This is also what makes Facebook such an effective vehicle for promoting so much garbage and what makes it the most pervasive personal surveillance system in the world. As long as that’s true, don’t expect Facebook to fix itself.

Hope lies, instead, with our power as citizens. We must demand that legislators and regulators get tougher. They should go after Facebook on antitrust grounds. Facebook is by far the dominant social platform in the United States, with 68 percent of American adults using it, according to the Pew Research Center. That means Facebook can gobble up potential competitors, as it already has with Instagram, and crowd out upstarts in fields such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

The Department of Justice should consider severing WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger from Facebook, much as it broke up AT&T in 1982. That breakup unleashed creativity, improved phone service and lowered prices. It also limited the political power of AT&T.

The European Union has already stepped up its legal efforts to protect data. Its General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect in May, is intended to ensure that users understand and consent to data collection and how that data is used. Users won’t have to agree to give access to their data to start using a product.

As with some recent American consumer finance regulations, data collection policies under the new European Union rules must be clear, concise and in plain language. Companies will have to declare up front how they will use the data, and users can withdraw consent at any time. This should significantly deter many abuses that companies like Facebook and Google have committed. It won’t repair the sins of the past. But it’s something.

Regulatory interventions have limitations. As long as Facebook is big and rich, its algorithms will determine and distort much of what we read and watch. Our long-term agenda should be to bolster institutions that foster democratic deliberation and the rational pursuit of knowledge. These include scientific organizations, universities, libraries, museums, newspapers and civic organizations. They have all been enfeebled over recent years as our resources and attention have shifted to the tiny addictive devices in our hands.

If we act together as citizens to champion these changes, we have a chance to curb the problems that Facebook has amplified. If we act as disconnected, indignant moral agents, we surrender the only power we have: the power to think and act collectively. We could even use Facebook to mount campaigns to rein in Facebook. It is, after all, a powerful tool for motivation, even if it’s a terrible tool for deliberation.

So go ahead and quit Facebook if it makes you feel calmer or more productive. Please realize, though, that you might be offloading problems onto those who may have less opportunity to protect privacy and dignity and are more vulnerable to threats to democracy. If the people who care the most about privacy, accountability and civil discourse evacuate Facebook in disgust, the entire platform becomes even less informed and diverse. Deactivation is the opposite of activism.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of the forthcoming book “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.”

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline: Deleting Facebook Won’t Fix It. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### The Jamal Khashoggi Case: Suspects Had Ties to Saudi Crown Prince - The New York Times

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The Jamal Khashoggi Case: Suspects Had Ties to Saudi Crown Prince

ISTANBUL — One of the suspects identified by Turkey in the disappearance of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi was a frequent companion of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — seen disembarking from airplanes with him in Paris and Madrid and photographed standing guard during his visits this year to Houston, Boston and the United Nations.

Three others are linked by witnesses and other records to the Saudi crown prince’s security detail.

A fifth is a forensic doctor who holds senior positions in the Saudi Interior Ministry and medical establishment, a figure of such stature that he could be directed only by a high-ranking Saudi authority.

If, as the Turkish authorities say, these men were present at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul where Mr. Khashoggi disappeared on Oct. 2, they might provide a direct link between what happened and Prince Mohammed. That would undercut any suggestion that Mr. Khashoggi died in a rogue operation unsanctioned by the crown prince. Their connection to him could also make it more difficult for the White House and Congress to accept such an explanation.

The New York Times has confirmed independently that at least nine of 15 suspects identified by Turkish authorities worked for the Saudi security services, military or other government ministries. One of them, Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, was a diplomat assigned to the Saudi Embassy in London in 2007, according to a British diplomatic roster. He traveled extensively with the crown prince, perhaps as a bodyguard.

How much blame for Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance or death settles on the 33-year-old crown prince has become a decisive factor in his standing in the eyes of the West and within the royal family.

The prince has presented himself as a reformer intent on opening up the kingdom’s economy and culture, and has used that image to try to influence White House policy in the region and to woo Western investors to help diversify the Saudi economy.

But the international revulsion at the reported assassination and mutilation of a single newspaper columnist — Mr. Khashoggi, who wrote for The Washington Post — has already sullied that image far more than previous missteps by the crown prince, from miring his country in a catastrophic war in Yemen to kidnapping the prime minister of Lebanon.

The crown prince and his father, King Salman, have denied any knowledge of Mr. Khashoggi’s whereabouts, repeatedly asserting that he left the consulate freely. Saudi officials did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

But in the last few days, as major American businesses have withdrawn from a marquee investment conference in Riyadh and members of Congress have stepped up calls for sanctions, the United States, Turkey and Saudi Arabia appear to have been searching for a face-saving way out.

The royal court was expected to acknowledge that Mr. Khashoggi was killed in the consulate, and to blame an intelligence agent for botching an operation to interrogate Mr. Khashoggi that ended up killing him.

President Trump floated the possibility on Monday that Mr. Khashoggi was the victim of “rogue killers.”

But such explanations would run up against a host of hard-to-explain obstacles.

The suspects’ positions in the Saudi government and their links to the crown prince could make it more difficult to absolve him of responsibility.

The presence of a forensic doctor who specializes in autopsies suggests the operation may have had a lethal intent from the start.

Image
A still from a security-camera video shows a jet that Turkish authorities say carried some of the Saudi agents involved in the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi.CreditSabah, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Turkish officials have said they possess evidence that the 15 Saudi agents flew into Istanbul on Oct. 2, assassinated Mr. Khashoggi, dismembered his body with a bone saw they had brought for the purpose, and flew out the same day. Records show that two private jets chartered by a Saudi company with close ties to the Saudi crown prince and Interior Ministry arrived and left Istanbul on the day of Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance.

Turkish officials said Mr. Khashoggi was killed within two hours of his arrival at the consulate. That timeline would not have allowed much time for an interrogation to go awry.

The Times gathered more information about the suspects using facial recognition, publicly available records, social media profiles, a database of Saudi cellphone numbers, Saudi news reports, leaked Saudi government documents and in some cases the accounts of witnesses in Saudi Arabia and countries the crown prince has visited.

Mr. Mutreb, the former diplomat in London, was photographed emerging from airplanes with Prince Mohammed on recent trips to Madrid and Paris. He was also photographed in Houston, Boston and the United Nations during the crown prince’s visits there, often glowering as he surveyed a crowd.

A French professional who has worked with the Saudi royal family identified a second suspect, Abdulaziz Mohammed al-Hawsawi, as a member of the security team that travels with the crown prince.

A Saudi news outlet reported that someone with the same name as a third suspect, Thaar Ghaleb al-Harbi, was promoted last year to the rank of lieutenant in the Saudi royal guard for bravery in the defense of Prince Mohammed’s palace in Jeddah.

A fourth suspect traveled with a passport bearing the name of another member of the royal guard, Muhammed Saad Alzahrani. A search of the name in Menom3ay, an app popular in Saudi Arabia that allows users to see the names other users have associated with certain phone numbers, identified him as a member of the royal guard. A guard wearing a name tag with that name appears in a video from 2017 standing next to Prince Mohammed.

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A Saudi investigative delegation entered the consulate in Istanbul on Monday before Turkish investigators arrived.CreditOzan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Members of the royal guard or aides who traveled with the crown prince may not report directly to him and may sometimes take on other duties. It is possible that some could have been recruited for an expedition to capture or interrogate Mr. Khashoggi, perhaps led by a senior intelligence official. But the presence among the suspects of an autopsy expert, Dr. Salah al-Tubaigy, suggests that killing might have been part of the original plan.

Dr. Tubaigy, who maintained a presence on several social media platforms, identified himself on his Twitter account as the head of the Saudi Scientific Council of Forensics and held lofty positions in the kingdom’s premier medical school as well as in its Interior Ministry. He studied at the University of Glasgow and in 2015 he spent three months in Australia as a visiting forensic pathologist at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. His published writings include works on dissection and mobile autopsies.

Although there is no public record of a relationship between him and the royal court, such a senior figure in the Saudi medical establishment was unlikely to join a rogue expedition organized by an underling.

Dr. Tubaigy, whose name first appeared among reports of the suspects several days ago, has not publicly addressed the allegations. None of the suspects could be reached for comment.

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Istanbul, Malachy Browne from New York, Ben Hubbard from Beirut, and David Botti in New York. Reporting was contributed by Alissa J. Rubin in Paris; Carlotta Gall in Istanbul; Adam Goldman and Christiaan Triebert in Washington; Karam Shoumali in Berlin; and Bian Elkhatib, Christoph Koettl and Barbara Marcolini in New York.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: 4 Suspects Identified In Khashoggi Mystery Have Links to Prince. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### The New York Times is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service

The New York Times is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service

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Today we are announcing an experiment in secure communication, and launching an alternative way for people to access our site: we are making the nytimes.com website available as a Tor Onion Service.

The New York Times reports on stories all over the world, and our reporting is read by people around the world. Some readers choose to use Tor to access our journalism because they’re technically blocked from accessing our website; or because they worry about local network monitoring; or because they care about online privacy; or simply because that is the method that they prefer.

The Times is dedicated to delivering quality, independent journalism, and our engineering team is committed to making sure that readers can access our journalism securely. This is why we are exploring ways to improve the experience of readers who use Tor to access our website.

One way we can help is to set up nytimes.com as an Onion Service — making our website accessible via a special, secure and hard-to-block VPN-like “tunnel” through the Tor network. The address for our Onion Service is:

https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/

This onion address is accessible only through the Tor network, using special software such as the Tor Browser. Such tools assure our readers that our website can be reached without monitors or blocks, and they provide additional guarantees that readers are connected securely to our website.

Technology

Onion Services exist for other organizations — most notably Facebook and ProPublica, each of which have created custom tooling to support their implementations. Our Onion Service is built using the open-source Enterprise Onion Toolkit (EOTK), which automates much of the configuration and management effort.

The New York Times’ Onion Service is both experimental and under development. This means that certain features, such as logins and comments, are disabled until the next phase of our implementation. We will be fine-tuning site performance, so there may be occasional outages while we make improvements to the service. Our goal is to match the features currently available on the main New York Times website.

Over time, we plan to share the lessons that we have learned — and will learn — about scaling and running an Onion Service. We welcome constructive feedback and bug reports via email to onion@nytimes.com.

Finally, we would like to extend our thanks to Alec Muffett for his assistance in configuring the Enterprise Onion Toolkit for our site.


Runa Sandvik is the Director of Information Security at The New York Times

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#####EOF##### Marriott Data Breach Is Traced to Chinese Hackers as U.S. Readies Crackdown on Beijing - The New York Times

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Marriott Data Breach Is Traced to Chinese Hackers as U.S. Readies Crackdown on Beijing

Image
From the first revelation that the Marriott’s computer systems had been breached, there was widespread suspicion that the hacking was part of a broad spy campaign to amass Americans’ personal data.CreditCreditScott Olson/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — The cyberattack on the Marriott hotel chain that collected personal details of roughly 500 million guests was part of a Chinese intelligence-gathering effort that also hacked health insurers and the security clearance files of millions more Americans, according to two people briefed on the investigation.

The hackers, they said, are suspected of working on behalf of the Ministry of State Security, the country’s Communist-controlled civilian spy agency. The discovery comes as the Trump administration is planning actions targeting China’s trade, cyber and economic policies, perhaps within days.

Those moves include indictments against Chinese hackers working for the intelligence services and the military, according to four government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The Trump administration also plans to declassify intelligence reports to reveal Chinese efforts dating to at least 2014 to build a database containing names of executives and American government officials with security clearances.

Other options include an executive order intended to make it harder for Chinese companies to obtain critical components for telecommunications equipment, a senior American official with knowledge of the plans said.

The moves stem from a growing concern within the administration that the 90-day trade truce negotiated two weeks ago by President Trump and President Xi Jinping in Buenos Aires might do little to change China’s behavior — including the coercion of American companies to hand over valuable technology if they seek to enter the Chinese market, as well as the theft of industrial secrets on behalf of state-owned companies.

The hacking of Marriott’s Starwood chain, which was discovered only in September and revealed late last month, is not expected to be part of the coming indictments. But two of the government officials said that it has added urgency to the administration’s crackdown, given that Marriott is the top hotel provider for American government and military personnel.

It also is a prime example of what has vexed the Trump administration as China has reverted over the past 18 months to the kind of intrusions into American companies and government agencies that President Barack Obama thought he had ended in 2015 in an agreement with Mr. Xi.

Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, denied any knowledge of the Marriott hacking. “China firmly opposes all forms of cyberattack and cracks down on it in accordance with the law,” he said. “If offered evidence, the relevant Chinese departments will carry out investigations according to the law.”

Trade negotiators on both sides of the Pacific have been working on an agreement under which China would commit to purchasing $1.2 trillion more of American goods and services over the next several years, and would address intellectual property concerns.

Mr. Trump said Tuesday that the United States and China were having “very productive conversations” as top American and Chinese officials held their first talks via telephone since the two countries agreed to a truce on Dec. 1.

But while top administration officials insist that the trade talks are proceeding on a separate track, the broader crackdown on China could undermine Mr. Trump’s ability to reach an agreement with Mr. Xi.

Image
A Chinese ship near Los Angeles. On Tuesday, President Trump said the United States and China were having “very productive conversations” on trade.CreditDavid McNew/Getty Images

American charges against senior members of China’s intelligence services risk hardening opposition in Beijing to negotiations with Mr. Trump. Another obstacle is the targeting of high-profile technology executives, like Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the communications giant Huawei and daughter of its founder.

The arrest of Ms. Meng, who has been detained in Canada on suspicion of fraud involving violations of United States sanctions against Iran, has angered China. She was granted bail of 10 million Canadian dollars, or $7.5 million, while awaiting extradition to the United States, a Canadian judge ruled on Tuesday.

Mr. Trump, in an interview on Tuesday with Reuters, said that he would consider intervening in the Huawei case if it would help serve national security and help get a trade deal done with China. Such a move would essentially pit Mr. Trump against his own Justice Department, which coordinated with Canada to arrest Ms. Meng as she changed planes in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“If I think it’s good for what will be certainly the largest trade deal ever made — which is a very important thing — what’s good for national security — I would certainly intervene if I thought it was necessary,” Mr. Trump said.

American business leaders have been bracing for retaliation from China, which has demanded the immediate release of Ms. Meng and accused both the United States and Canada of violating her rights.

On Tuesday, the International Crisis Group said that one of its employees, a former Canadian diplomat, had been detained in China. The disappearance of the former diplomat, Michael Kovrig, could further inflame tensions between China and Canada.

“We are doing everything possible to secure additional information on Michael’s whereabouts, as well as his prompt and safe release,” the group said in a statement on its website.

From the first revelation that the Marriott chain’s computer systems had been breached, there was widespread suspicion in both Washington and among cybersecurity firms that the hacking was not a matter of commercial espionage, but part of a much broader spy campaign to amass Americans’ personal data.

While American intelligence agencies have not reached a final assessment of who performed the hacking, a range of firms brought in to assess the damage quickly saw computer code and patterns familiar to operations by Chinese actors.

The Marriott database contains not only credit card information but passport data. Lisa Monaco, a former homeland security adviser under Mr. Obama, noted last week at a conference that passport information would be particularly valuable in tracking who is crossing borders and what they look like, among other key data.

But officials on Tuesday said it was only part of an aggressive operation whose centerpiece was the 2014 hacking into the Office of Personnel Management. At the time, the government bureau loosely guarded the detailed forms that Americans fill out to get security clearances — forms that contain financial data; information about spouses, children and past romantic relationships; and any meetings with foreigners.

Such information is exactly what the Chinese use to root out spies, recruit intelligence agents and build a rich repository of Americans’ personal data for future targeting. With those details and more that were stolen from insurers like Anthem, the Marriott data adds another critical element to the intelligence profile: travel habits.

James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, said the Chinese have collected “huge pots of data” to feed a Ministry of State Security database seeking to identify American spies — and the Chinese people talking to them.

“Big data is the new wave for counterintelligence,” Mr. Lewis said.

“It’s big-data hoovering,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, the chief technology officer at CrowdStrike, who first highlighted Chinese hacking as a threat researcher in 2011. “This data is all going back to a data lake that can be used for counterintelligence, recruiting new assets, anticorruption campaigns or future targeting of individuals or organizations.”

In the Marriott case, Chinese spies stole passport numbers for up to 327 million people — many of whom stayed at Sheraton, Westin and W hotels and at other Starwood-branded properties. But Marriott has not said if it would pay to replace those passports, an undertaking that would cost tens of billions of dollars.

Instead, Connie Kim, a Marriott spokeswoman, said the hotel chain would cover the cost of replacement if “fraud has taken place.” That means the company would not cover the cost of having exposed private data to the Chinese intelligence agencies if they did not use it to conduct commercial transactions — even though that is a breach of privacy and, perhaps, security.

And even for those guests who did not have passport information on file with the hotels, their phone numbers, birth dates and itineraries remain vulnerable.

That data, Mr. Lewis and others said, can be used to track which Chinese citizens visited the same city, or hotel, as an American intelligence agent who was identified in data taken from the Office of Personnel Management or from American health insurers that document patients’ medical histories and Social Security numbers.

The effort to amass Americans’ personal information so alarmed government officials that in 2016, the Obama administration threatened to block a $14 billion bid by China’s Anbang Insurance Group Co. to acquire Starwood Hotel & Resorts Worldwide, according to one former official familiar with the work of the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, a secretive government body that reviews foreign acquisitions.

Ultimately, the failed bid cleared the way later that year for Marriott Hotels to acquire Starwood for $13.6 billion, becoming the world’s largest hotel chain.

As it turned out, it was too late: Starwood’s data had already been stolen by Chinese state hackers, though the breach was not discovered until this past summer, and was disclosed by Marriott on Nov. 30.

It is unclear that any kind of trade agreement reached with China by the Trump administration can address this kind of theft.

The Chinese regard intrusions into hotel chain databases as a standard kind of espionage. So does the United States, which has often seized guest data from foreign hotels.

Even the Office of Personnel Management hacking was viewed by American intelligence officials with some admiration. “If we had the opportunity to do the same thing, we’d probably do it,” James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, told Congress afterward.

“One thing is very clear to me, and it is that they are not going to stop this,” Mr. Alperovitch said. “This is what any nation-state intelligence agency would do. No nation-state is going to handcuff themselves and say, ‘You can’t do this,’ because they all engage in similar detection.”

Since 2012, analysts at the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, the GCHQ, have watched with growing alarm as sophisticated Chinese hackers, based in Tianjin, began switching targets from companies and government agencies in the defense, energy and aerospace sectors to organizations that housed troves of Americans’ personal information.

At the time, one classified National Security Agency report noted that the hackers’ “exact affiliation with Chinese government entities is not known, but their activities indicate a probable intelligence requirement feed” from China’s Ministry of State Security.

David E. Sanger, Glenn Thrush and Alan Rappeport reported from Washington, and Nicole Perlroth from San Francisco. Katie Benner contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Marriott Data Breach Traced to Chinese Hackers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Service Meant to Monitor Inmates’ Calls Could Track You, Too - The New York Times

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Service Meant to Monitor Inmates’ Calls Could Track You, Too

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Cory Hutcheson, a former Missouri sheriff, was charged with using a private service to track people’s cellphones without court orders.CreditCreditMississippi County Sheriff Office

By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries

Thousands of jails and prisons across the United States use a company called Securus Technologies to provide and monitor calls to inmates. But the former sheriff of Mississippi County, Mo., used a lesser-known Securus service to track people’s cellphones, including those of other officers, without court orders, according to charges filed against him in state and federal court.

The service can find the whereabouts of almost any cellphone in the country within seconds. It does this by going through a system typically used by marketers and other companies to get location data from major cellphone carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, documents show.

Between 2014 and 2017, the sheriff, Cory Hutcheson, used the service at least 11 times, prosecutors said. His alleged targets included a judge and members of the State Highway Patrol. Mr. Hutcheson, who was dismissed last year in an unrelated matter, has pleaded not guilty in the surveillance cases.

As location tracking has become more accurate, and as more people carry their phones at every waking moment, the ability of law enforcement officers and companies like Securus to get that data has become an ever greater privacy concern.

Securus offers the location-finding service as an additional feature for law enforcement and corrections officials, part of an effort to entice customers in a lucrative but competitive industry. In promotional packets, the company, one of the largest prison phone providers in the country, recounts several instances in which the service was used.

In one, a woman sentenced to drug rehab left the center but was eventually located by an official using the service. Other examples include an official who found a missing Alzheimer’s patient and detectives who used “precise location information positioning” to get “within 42 feet of the suspect’s location” in a murder case.

Asked about Securus’s vetting of surveillance requests, a company spokesman said that it required customers to upload a legal document, such as a warrant or affidavit, and certify that the activity was authorized.

“Securus is neither a judge nor a district attorney, and the responsibility of ensuring the legal adequacy of supporting documentation lies with our law enforcement customers and their counsel,” the spokesman said in a statement. Securus offers services only to law enforcement and corrections facilities, and not all officials at a given location have access to the system, the spokesman said.

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, wrote in a letter this week to the Federal Communications Commission that Securus confirmed that it did not “conduct any review of surveillance requests.” The senator said relying on customers to provide documentation was inadequate. “Wireless carriers have an obligation to take affirmative steps to verify law enforcement requests,” he wrote, adding that Securus did not follow those procedures.

Image
The location-tracking platform, offered through a company called Securus Technologies that caters to law enforcement and corrections officials.

The service provided by Securus reveals a potential weakness in a system that is supposed to protect the private information of millions of cellphone users. With customers’ consent, carriers sell the ability to acquire location data for marketing purposes like providing coupons when someone is near a business, or services like roadside assistance or bank fraud protection. Companies that use the data generally sign contracts pledging to get people’s approval — through a response to a text message, for example, or the push of a button on a menu — or to otherwise use the data legally.

But the contracts between the companies, including Securus, are “the legal equivalent of a pinky promise,” Mr. Wyden wrote. The F.C.C. said it was reviewing the letter.

Courts are split on whether investigators need a warrant based on probable cause to acquire location data. In some states, a warrant is required for any sort of cellphone tracking. In other states, it is needed only if an investigator wants the data in real time. And in others no warrant is needed at all.

The Justice Department has said its policy is to get warrants for real-time tracking. The Supreme Court has ruled that putting a GPS tracker on a car counts as a search under the Fourth Amendment, but this was because installing the device involved touching a person’s property — something that doesn’t happen when a cellphone is pinged.

Phone companies have a legal responsibility under the Telecommunications Act to protect consumer data, including call location, and can provide it in response to a legal order or sell it for use with customer consent. But lawyers interviewed by The New York Times disagreed on whether location information that was not gathered during the course of a call had the same protections under the law.

As long as they are following their own privacy policies, carriers “are largely free to do what they want with the information they obtain, including location information, as long as it’s unrelated to a phone call,” said Albert Gidari, the consulting director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and a former technology and telecommunications lawyer. Even when the phone is not making a call, the system receives location data, accurate within a few hundred feet, by communicating with the device and asking it which cellphone towers it is near.

Other experts said the law should apply for any communications on a network, not just phone calls. “If the phone companies are giving someone a direct portal into the real-time location data on all of their customers, they should be policing it,” said Laura Moy, the deputy director of the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology.

Mr. Wyden, in his letter to the F.C.C., also said that carriers had an obligation to verify whether law enforcement requests were legal. But Securus cuts the carriers out of the review process, because the carriers do not receive the legal documents.

The letter called for an F.C.C. investigation into Securus, as well as the phone companies and their protections of user data. Mr. Wyden also sent letters to the major carriers, seeking audits of their relationships with companies that buy consumer data. Representatives for AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon said the companies had received the letters and were investigating.

“If this company is, in fact, doing this with our customers’ data, we will take steps to stop it,” said Rich Young, a Verizon spokesman. T-Mobile said it “would take appropriate action” if it found any misuse of data.

Image
Senator Ron Wyden this week called for an investigation into Securus, as well as phone companies and their protections of user data.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times

AT&T also said it followed industry “best practices” in handling data, and Sprint said it shared location information only with customer consent or in response to lawful requests.

Privacy concerns about Securus and location services were raised to the F.C.C. last year before the company’s sale to Platinum Equity, a private equity firm, for about $1.5 billion. Lee Petro, a lawyer representing a group of inmate family members, wrote letters urging the commission to reject the deal, based in part on concerns about locating people who spoke with inmates over the phone.

Securus, founded in Dallas in 1986, has marketed its location service as a way for officials to monitor where inmates placed calls. Securus has said this would block escape attempts and the smuggling of contraband into jails and prisons, and help track calls to areas “known for generating illegal activity.”

In an email, Securus said the service was based on cell tower information, not on phone GPS.

Securus received the data from a mobile marketing company called 3Cinteractive, according to 2013 documents from the Florida Department of Corrections. Securus said that for confidentiality reasons it could not confirm whether that deal was still in place, but a spokesman for Mr. Wyden said the company told the senator’s office it was. In turn, 3Cinteractive got its data from LocationSmart, a firm known as a location aggregator, according to documents from those companies. LocationSmart buys access to the data from all the major American carriers, it says.

LocationSmart and 3Cinteractive did not respond to requests for comment.

Securus said it got consent before tracking phone calls made from prisons, requiring those on the receiving end to press a button agreeing to the collection of the data.

The location service has proved to be a selling point. Matthew Thomas, chief deputy of the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona, said that the department had been using Securus’s location tool for about a month, and that it had already come in handy. “We use it for search-and-rescue operations, and at the jail they use it to maintain security and to put cases together,” he said.

Mr. Thomas said that only three people in the office could log in to the system, and that the office did monthly audits to ensure its proper use.

About three weeks ago, Mr. Thomas said, someone mailed a letter containing methamphetamine to an inmate. By using the tool, Mr. Thomas said, investigators were able to link phone calls between the address and the inmate and make an arrest.

For search-and-rescue cases, Mr. Thomas said, the Securus tool was more efficient than requesting data through the phone companies. “It makes it a lot faster response for our crew,” he said.

In such instances, the people being located cannot give consent, so the official is supposed to upload a warrant, affidavit or court order to justify the surveillance.

Securus said that it had cooperated with officials investigating the case in Missouri.

Mr. Hutcheson, the defendant in the surveillance case, was charged with forgery in state court last year and also by a federal grand jury in March over similar offenses related to the phone pinging. He was removed from his duties as sheriff in 2017 after an inmate’s death, though he was not charged with a crime in that matter. The Highway Patrol officers who were allegedly tracked filed suit in federal court. Mr. Hutcheson’s lawyer declined to comment on the litigation.

Timothy Williams contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Meant to Monitor Prison Calls, Service Could Track You, Too. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Secret Back Door in Some U.S. Phones Sent Data to China, Analysts Say - The New York Times

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Secret Back Door in Some U.S. Phones Sent Data to China, Analysts Say

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Security contractors recently discovered preinstalled software in some Android phones that monitors where users go, whom they talk to and what they write in text messages.CreditCreditEmilio Morenatti/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — For about $50, you can get a smartphone with a high-definition display, fast data service and, according to security contractors, a secret feature: a backdoor that sends all your text messages to China every 72 hours.

Security contractors recently discovered preinstalled software in some Android phones that monitors where users go, whom they talk to and what they write in text messages. The American authorities say it is not clear whether this represents secretive data mining for advertising purposes or a Chinese government effort to collect intelligence.

International customers and users of disposable or prepaid phones are the people most affected by the software. But the scope is unclear. The Chinese company that wrote the software, Shanghai Adups Technology Company, says its code runs on more than 700 million phones, cars and other smart devices. One American phone manufacturer, BLU Products, said that 120,000 of its phones had been affected and that it had updated the software to eliminate the feature.

Kryptowire, the security firm that discovered the vulnerability, said the Adups software transmitted the full contents of text messages, contact lists, call logs, location information and other data to a Chinese server. The code comes preinstalled on phones and the surveillance is not disclosed to users, said Tom Karygiannis, a vice president of Kryptowire, which is based in Fairfax, Va. “Even if you wanted to, you wouldn’t have known about it,” he said.

Security experts frequently discover vulnerabilities in consumer electronics, but this case is exceptional. It was not a bug. Rather, Adups intentionally designed the software to help a Chinese phone manufacturer monitor user behavior, according to a document that Adups provided to explain the problem to BLU executives. That version of the software was not intended for American phones, the company said.

“This is a private company that made a mistake,” said Lily Lim, a lawyer in Palo Alto, Calif., who represents Adups.

The episode shows how companies throughout the technology supply chain can compromise privacy, with or without the knowledge of manufacturers or customers. It also offers a look at one way that Chinese companies — and by extension the government — can monitor cellphone behavior. For many years, the Chinese government has used a variety of methods to filter and track internet use and monitor online conversations. It requires technology companies that operate in China to follow strict rules. Ms. Lim said Adups was not affiliated with the Chinese government.

At the heart of the issue is a special type of software, known as firmware, that tells phones how to operate. Adups provides the code that lets companies remotely update their firmware, an important function that is largely unseen by users. Normally, when a phone manufacturer updates its firmware, it tells customers what it is doing and whether it will use any personal information. Even if that is disclosed in long legal disclosures that customers routinely ignore, it is at least disclosed. That did not happen with the Adups software, Kryptowire said.

According to its website, Adups provides software to two of the largest cellphone manufacturers in the world, ZTE and Huawei. Both are based in China.

Samuel Ohev-Zion, the chief executive of the Florida-based BLU Products, said: “It was obviously something that we were not aware of. We moved very quickly to correct it.”

He added that Adups had assured him that all of the information taken from BLU customers had been destroyed.

The software was written at the request of an unidentified Chinese manufacturer that wanted the ability to store call logs, text messages and other data, according to the Adups document. Adups said the Chinese company used the data for customer support.

Ms. Lim said the software was intended to help the Chinese client identify junk text messages and calls. She did not identify the company that requested it and said she did not know how many phones were affected. She said phone companies, not Adups, were responsible for disclosing privacy policies to users. “Adups was just there to provide functionality that the phone distributor asked for,” she said.

Android phones run software that is developed by Google and distributed free for phone manufacturers to customize. A Google official said the company had told Adups to remove the surveillance ability from phones that run services like the Google Play store. That would not include devices in China, where hundreds of millions of people use Android phones but where Google does not operate because of censorship concerns.

Because Adups has not published a list of affected phones, it is not clear how users can determine whether their phones are vulnerable. “People who have some technical skills could,” Mr. Karygiannis, the Kryptowire vice president, said. “But the average consumer? No.”

Ms. Lim said she did not know how customers could determine whether they were affected.

Adups also provides what it calls “big data” services to help companies study their customers, “to know better about them, about what they like and what they use and there they come from and what they prefer to provide better service,” according to its website.

Kryptowire discovered the problem through a combination of happenstance and curiosity. A researcher there bought an inexpensive phone, the BLU R1 HD, for a trip overseas. While setting up the phone, he noticed unusual network activity, Mr. Karygiannis said. Over the next week, analysts noticed that the phone was transmitting text messages to a server in Shanghai and was registered to Adups, according to a Kryptowire report.

Kryptowire took its findings to the United States government. It made its report public on Tuesday.

Marsha Catron, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the agency “was recently made aware of the concerns discovered by Kryptowire and is working with our public and private sector partners to identify appropriate mitigation strategies.”

Kryptowire is a Homeland Security contractor but analyzed the BLU phone independent of that contract.

Mr. Ohev-Zion, the BLU chief executive, said he was confident that the problem had been resolved for his customers. “Today there is no BLU device that is collecting that information,” he said.

Adam Goldman contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Text a Message, China Gets a Peek. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Opinion | Facebook’s Surveillance Machine - The New York Times

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Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

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Facebook users go to the site for social interaction, only to be quietly subjected to an enormous level of surveillance.CreditCreditThibault Camus/Associated Press

In 2014, Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company that would later provide services for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, reached out with a request on Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” platform, an online marketplace where people around the world contract with others to perform various tasks. Cambridge Analytica was looking for people who were American Facebook users. It offered to pay them to download and use a personality quiz app on Facebook called thisisyourdigitallife.

About 270,000 people installed the app in return for $1 to $2 per download. The app “scraped” information from their Facebook profiles as well as detailed information from their friends’ profiles. Facebook then provided all this data to the makers of the app, who in turn turned it over to Cambridge Analytica.

A few hundred thousand people may not seem like a lot, but because Facebook users have a few hundred friends each on average, the number of people whose data was harvested reached about 50 million. Most of those people had no idea that their data had been siphoned off (after all, they hadn’t installed the app themselves), let alone that the data would be used to shape voter targeting and messaging for Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.

This weekend, after this was all exposed by The New York Times and The Observer of London, Facebook hastily made a public announcement that it was suspending Cambridge Analytica (well over a year after the election) and vehemently denied that this was a “data breach.” Paul Grewal, a vice president and deputy general counsel at Facebook, wrote that “the claim that this is a data breach is completely false.” He contended that Facebook users “knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.” He also said that “everyone involved gave their consent.”

Mr. Grewal is right: This wasn’t a breach in the technical sense. It is something even more troubling: an all-too-natural consequence of Facebook’s business model, which involves having people go to the site for social interaction, only to be quietly subjected to an enormous level of surveillance. The results of that surveillance are used to fuel a sophisticated and opaque system for narrowly targeting advertisements and other wares to Facebook’s users.

Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.

Facebook doesn’t just record every click and “like” on the site. It also collects browsing histories. It also purchases “external” data like financial information about users (though European nations have some regulations that block some of this). Facebook recently announced its intent to merge “offline” data — things you do in the physical world, such as making purchases in a brick-and-mortar store — with its vast online databases.

Facebook even creates “shadow profiles” of nonusers. That is, even if you are not on Facebook, the company may well have compiled a profile of you, inferred from data provided by your friends or from other data. This is an involuntary dossier from which you cannot opt out in the United States.

Despite Facebook’s claims to the contrary, everyone involved in the Cambridge Analytica data-siphoning incident did not give his or her “consent” — at least not in any meaningful sense of the word. It is true that if you found and read all the fine print on the site, you might have noticed that in 2014, your Facebook friends had the right to turn over all your data through such apps. (Facebook has since turned off this feature.) If you had managed to make your way through a bewildering array of options, you might have even discovered how to turn the feature off.

This wasn’t informed consent. This was the exploitation of user data and user trust.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you had explicitly consented to turn over your Facebook data to another company. Do you keep up with the latest academic research on computational inference? Did you know that algorithms now do a pretty good job of inferring a person’s personality traits, sexual orientation, political views, mental health status, substance abuse history and more just from his or her Facebook “likes” — and that there are new applications of this data being discovered every day?

Given this confusing and rapidly changing state of affairs about what the data may reveal and how it may be used, consent to ongoing and extensive data collection can be neither fully informed nor truly consensual — especially since it is practically irrevocable.

What did Cambridge Analytica do with all the data? With whom else might it have shared it? In 2015, Facebook sent a stern letter to Cambridge Analytica asking that the data be deleted. Cambridge Analytica employees have said that the company merely checked a box indicating that the data was deleted, at which point Facebook decided not to inform the 50 million users who were affected by the breach, nor to make the issue public, nor to sanction Cambridge Analytica at the time.

The New York Times and The Observer of London are reporting that the data was not deleted. And Cambridge Analytica employees are claiming that the data formed the backbone of the company’s operations in the 2016 presidential election.

If Facebook failed to understand that this data could be used in dangerous ways, that it shouldn’t have let anyone harvest data in this manner and that a third-party ticking a box on a form wouldn’t free the company from responsibility, it had no business collecting anyone’s data in the first place. But the vast infrastructure Facebook has built to obtain data, and its consequent half-a-trillion-dollar market capitalization, suggest that the company knows all too well the value of this kind of vast data surveillance.

Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. In many countries, Facebook and its products simply are the internet. Some employers and landlords demand to see Facebook profiles, and there are increasingly vast swaths of public and civic life — from volunteer groups to political campaigns to marches and protests — that are accessible or organized only via Facebook.

The problem here goes beyond Cambridge Analytica and what it may have done. What other apps were allowed to siphon data from millions of Facebook users? What if one day Facebook decides to suspend from its site a presidential campaign or a politician whose platform calls for things like increased data privacy for individuals and limits on data retention and use? What if it decides to share data with one political campaign and not another? What if it gives better ad rates to candidates who align with its own interests?

A business model based on vast data surveillance and charging clients to opaquely target users based on this kind of extensive profiling will inevitably be misused. The real problem is that billions of dollars are being made at the expense of the health of our public sphere and our politics, and crucial decisions are being made unilaterally, and without recourse or accountability.

Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, the author of “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest” and a contributing opinion writer.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

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#####EOF##### Spies Infiltrate a Fantasy Realm of Online Games - The New York Times

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Spies Infiltrate a Fantasy Realm of Online Games

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One of the most extraordinary things revealed in the documents disclosed by Edward J. Snowden is the surveillance of video games like World of Warcraft by Western spy agencies.CreditCreditThe Guardian/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Mark Mazzetti and Justin Elliott

Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents.

Fearing that terrorist or criminal networks could use the games to communicate secretly, move money or plot attacks, the documents show, intelligence operatives have entered terrain populated by digital avatars that include elves, gnomes and supermodels.

The spies have created make-believe characters to snoop and to try to recruit informers, while also collecting data and contents of communications between players, according to the documents, disclosed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. Because militants often rely on features common to video games — fake identities, voice and text chats, a way to conduct financial transactions — American and British intelligence agencies worried that they might be operating there, according to the papers.

Online games might seem innocuous, a top-secret 2008 N.S.A. document warned, but they had the potential to be a “target-rich communication network” allowing intelligence suspects “a way to hide in plain sight.” Virtual games “are an opportunity!” another 2008 N.S.A. document declared.

But for all their enthusiasm — so many C.I.A., F.B.I. and Pentagon spies were hunting around in Second Life, the document noted, that a “deconfliction” group was needed to avoid collisions — the intelligence agencies may have inflated the threat.

The documents, obtained by The Guardian and shared with The New York Times and ProPublica, do not cite any counterterrorism successes from the effort. Former American intelligence officials, current and former gaming company employees and outside experts said in interviews that they knew of little evidence that terrorist groups viewed the games as havens to communicate and plot operations.

Games “are built and operated by companies looking to make money, so the players’ identity and activity is tracked,” said Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, an author of “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know.” “For terror groups looking to keep their communications secret, there are far more effective and easier ways to do so than putting on a troll avatar.”

The surveillance, which also included Microsoft’s Xbox Live, could raise privacy concerns. It is not clear exactly how the agencies got access to gamers’ data or communications, how many players may have been monitored or whether Americans’ communications or activities were captured.

One American company, the maker of World of Warcraft, said that neither the N.S.A. nor its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters, had gotten permission to gather intelligence in its game. Many players are Americans, who can be targeted for surveillance only with approval from the nation’s secret intelligence court. The spy agencies, though, face far fewer restrictions on collecting certain data or communications overseas.

"We are unaware of any surveillance taking place," said a spokesman for Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif., which makes World of Warcraft. "If it was, it would have been done without our knowledge or permission." 

A spokeswoman for Microsoft declined to comment. Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life and a former chief executive officer of Linden Lab, the game’s maker, declined to comment on the spying revelations. Current Linden executives did not respond to requests for comment.

A Government Communications Headquarters spokesman would neither confirm nor deny any involvement by that agency in gaming surveillance, but said that its work is conducted under “a strict legal and policy framework” with rigorous oversight. An N.S.A. spokeswoman declined to comment.

Intelligence and law enforcement officials became interested in games after some became enormously popular, drawing tens of millions of people worldwide, from preteens to retirees. The games rely on lifelike graphics, virtual currencies and the ability to speak to other players in real time. Some gamers merge the virtual and real worlds by spending long hours playing and making close online friends.

In World of Warcraft, players share the same fantasy universe — walking around and killing computer-controlled monsters or the avatars of other players, including elves, animals or creatures known as orcs. In Second Life, players create customized human avatars that can resemble themselves or take on other personas — supermodels and bodybuilders are popular — who can socialize, buy and sell virtual goods, and go places like beaches, cities, art galleries and strip clubs. In Microsoft’s Xbox Live service, subscribers connect online in games that can involve activities like playing soccer or shooting at each other in space.

According to American officials and the documents, spy agencies grew worried that terrorist groups might take to the virtual worlds to establish safe communications channels.

In 2007, as the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies were beginning to explore virtual games, N.S.A. officials met with the chief technology officer for the manufacturer of Second Life, the San Francisco-based Linden Lab. The executive, Cory Ondrejka, was a former Navy officer who had worked at the N.S.A. with a top-secret security clearance.

He visited the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., in May 2007 to speak to staff members over a brown bag lunch, according to an internal agency announcement. “Second Life has proven that virtual worlds of social networking are a reality: come hear Cory tell you why!” said the announcement. It added that virtual worlds gave the government the opportunity “to understand the motivation, context and consequent behaviors of non-Americans through observation, without leaving U.S. soil.”

Mr. Ondrejka, now the director of mobile engineering at Facebook, said through a representative that the N.S.A. presentation was similar to others he gave in that period, and declined to comment further.

Even with spies already monitoring games, the N.S.A. thought it needed to step up the effort.

“The Sigint Enterprise needs to begin taking action now to plan for collection, processing, presentation and analysis of these communications,” said one April 2008 N.S.A. document, referring to “signals intelligence.” The document added, “With a few exceptions, N.S.A. can’t even recognize the traffic,” meaning that the agency could not distinguish gaming data from other Internet traffic.

By the end of 2008, according to one document, the British spy agency, known as GCHQ, had set up its “first operational deployment into Second Life” and had helped the police in London in cracking down on a crime ring that had moved into virtual worlds to sell stolen credit card information. The British spies running the effort, which was code-named Operation Galician, were aided by an informer using a digital avatar “who helpfully volunteered information on the target group’s latest activities.”

Though the games might appear to be unregulated digital bazaars, the companies running them reserve the right to police the communications of players and store the chat dialogues in servers that can be searched later. The transactions conducted with the virtual money common in the games, used in World of Warcraft to buy weapons and potions to slay monsters, are also monitored by the companies to prevent illicit financial dealings.

In the 2008 N.S.A. document, titled “Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments,” the agency said that “terrorist target selectors” — which could be a computer’s Internet Protocol address or an email account — “have been found associated with Xbox Live, Second Life, World of Warcraft” and other games. But that document does not present evidence that terrorists were participating in the games.

Still, the intelligence agencies found other benefits in infiltrating these online worlds. According to the minutes of a January 2009 meeting, GCHQ’s “network gaming exploitation team” had identified engineers, embassy drivers, scientists and other foreign intelligence operatives to be World of Warcraft players — potential targets for recruitment as agents.  

At Menwith Hill, a Royal Air Force base in the Yorkshire countryside that the N.S.A. has long used as an outpost to intercept global communications, American and British intelligence operatives started an effort in 2008 to begin collecting data from World of Warcraft.

One N.S.A. document said that the World of Warcraft monitoring “continues to uncover potential Sigint value by identifying accounts, characters and guilds related to Islamic extremist groups, nuclear proliferation and arms dealing.” In other words, targets of interest appeared to be playing the fantasy game, though the document does not indicate that they were doing so for any nefarious purposes. A British document from later that year said that GCHQ had “successfully been able to get the discussions between different game players on Xbox Live.”

By 2009, the collection was extensive. One document says that while GCHQ was testing its ability to spy on Second Life in real time, British intelligence officers vacuumed up three days’ worth of Second Life chat, instant message and financial transaction data, totaling 176,677 lines of data, which included the content of the communications.

For their part, players have openly wondered whether the N.S.A. might be watching them.

In one World of Warcraft discussion thread, begun just days after the first Snowden revelations appeared in the news media in June, a human death knight with the user name “Crrassus” asked whether the N.S.A. might be reading game chat logs.

“If they ever read these forums,” wrote a goblin priest with the user name “Diaya,” “they would realize they were wasting” their time.

Even before the American government began spying in virtual worlds, the Pentagon had identified the potential intelligence value of video games. The Pentagon’s Special Operations Command in 2006 and 2007 worked with several foreign companies — including an obscure digital media business based in Prague — to build games that could be downloaded to mobile phones, according to people involved in the effort. They said the games, which were not identified as creations of the Pentagon, were then used as vehicles for intelligence agencies to collect information about the users.

Eager to cash in on the government’s growing interest in virtual worlds, several large private contractors have spent years pitching their services to American intelligence agencies. In one 66-page document from 2007, part of the cache released by Mr. Snowden, the contracting giant SAIC promoted its ability to support “intelligence collection in the game space,” and warned that online games could be used by militant groups to recruit followers and could provide “terrorist organizations with a powerful platform to reach core target audiences.”

It is unclear whether SAIC received a contract based on this proposal, but one former SAIC employee said that the company at one point had a lucrative contract with the C.I.A. for work that included monitoring the Internet for militant activity. An SAIC spokeswoman declined to comment.

In spring 2009, academics and defense contractors gathered at the Marriott at Washington Dulles International Airport to present proposals for a government study about how players’ behavior in a game like World of Warcraft might be linked to their real-world identities. “We were told it was highly likely that persons of interest were using virtual spaces to communicate or coordinate,” said Dmitri Williams, a professor at the University of Southern California who received grant money as part of the program.

After the conference, both SAIC and Lockheed Martin won contracts worth several million dollars, administered by an office within the intelligence community that finances research projects.

It is not clear how useful such research might be. A group at the Palo Alto Research Center, for example, produced a government-funded study of World of Warcraft that found “younger players and male players preferring competitive, hack-and-slash activities, and older and female players preferring noncombat activities,” such as exploring the virtual world. A group from the nonprofit SRI International, meanwhile, found that players under age 18 often used all capital letters both in chat messages and in their avatar names.

Those involved in the project were told little by their government patrons. According to Nick Yee, a Palo Alto researcher who worked on the effort, “We were specifically asked not to speculate on the government’s motivations and goals.”

Justin Elliott is a reporter for ProPublica. Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Spies Infiltrate a Fantasy Realm of Online Games. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Facebook Did Not Securely Store Passwords. Here’s What You Need to Know. - The New York Times

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Facebook Did Not Securely Store Passwords. Here’s What You Need to Know.

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Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook. The company said millions of user account passwords had been stored insecurely.CreditCreditStephen Lam/Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook said on Thursday that millions of user account passwords had been stored insecurely, potentially allowing employees to gain access to people’s accounts without their knowledge.

The Silicon Valley company publicized the security failure around the same time that Brian Krebs, a cybersecurity writer, reported the password vulnerability. Mr. Krebs said an audit by Facebook had found that hundreds of millions of user passwords dating to 2012 were stored in a format known as plain text, which makes the passwords readable to more than 20,000 of the company’s employees.

Facebook said that it had found no evidence of abuse and that it would begin alerting millions of its users and thousands of Instagram users about the issue. The company said it would not require people to reset their passwords.

The security failure is another embarrassment for Facebook, a $470 billion colossus that employs some of the most sought-after cybersecurity experts in the industry. It adds to a growing list of data scandals that have tarnished Facebook’s reputation over the last few years. Last year, amid revelations that a political consulting firm improperly gained access to the data of millions, Facebook also revealed that an attack on its network had exposed the personal information of tens of millions of users.

In response, the company has repeatedly said it plans to improve how it safeguards people’s data.

“There is nothing more important to us than protecting people’s information, and we will continue making improvements as part of our ongoing security efforts at Facebook,” Pedro Canahuati, Facebook’s vice president of engineering in security and privacy, said in a blog post on Thursday.

Here’s a rundown of what you need to know about the password vulnerability and what you can do.

Storing passwords in plain text is a poor security practice. It leaves passwords wide open to cyberattacks or potential employee abuse. A better security practice would have been to keep the passwords in a scrambled format that is indecipherable.

Facebook said it had not found evidence of abuse, but that does not mean it did not occur. Citing a Facebook insider, Mr. Krebs said access records revealed that 2,000 engineers or developers had made nine million queries for data that included plain-text user passwords.

A Facebook employee could have shared your password with someone else who would then have improper access to your account, for instance. Or an employee could have read your password and used it to log on to a different site where you used the same password. There are plenty of possibilities.

Ultimately, a company as large, rich and well staffed as Facebook should have known better.

There’s no easy way to know. Facebook is still investigating, and will begin alerting people who might have had their passwords stored in the plain text format.

Facebook is not requiring users to change their passwords, but you should do it anyway.

There are many methods for setting strong passwords — for example, do not use the same password across multiple sites, and do not use your Social Security number as a username or a password. You can set up security features such as two-step verification as well.

There are a few other steps to take. I recommend also setting up your Facebook account to receive alerts in the event that an unrecognized device logs in to the account. To do so, go to your Facebook app settings, tap Security and Login, and then tap Get alerts about unrecognized logins. From here, you can choose to receive the alerts via messages, email or notifications.

An audit of devices that are logged in to your account may also be in order, so that you know what laptops, phones and other gadgets are already accessing your account. On Facebook’s Security and Login page, under the tab labeled “Where You’re Logged In,” you can see a list of devices that are signed in to your account, as well as their locations.

If you see an unfamiliar gadget or a device signed in from an odd location, you can click the “Remove” button to boot the device out of your account.

Follow Brian X. Chen on Twitter: @bxchen.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Coping With Facebook’s Password Blunder. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories - The New York Times

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A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories

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Unidentified soldiers overran Crimea in March 2014. Russia reclaimed the territory from Ukraine, and President Vladimir V. Putin later admitted that the troops were Russian special forces.CreditCreditSergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

STOCKHOLM — With a vigorous national debate underway on whether Sweden should enter a military partnership with NATO, officials in Stockholm suddenly encountered an unsettling problem: a flood of distorted and outright false information on social media, confusing public perceptions of the issue.

The claims were alarming: If Sweden, a non-NATO member, signed the deal, the alliance would stockpile secret nuclear weapons on Swedish soil; NATO could attack Russia from Sweden without government approval; NATO soldiers, immune from prosecution, could rape Swedish women without fear of criminal charges.

They were all false, but the disinformation had begun spilling into the traditional news media, and as the defense minister, Peter Hultqvist, traveled the country to promote the pact in speeches and town hall meetings, he was repeatedly grilled about the bogus stories.

“People were not used to it, and they got scared, asking what can be believed, what should be believed?” said Marinette Nyh Radebo, Mr. Hultqvist’s spokeswoman.

As often happens in such cases, Swedish officials were never able to pin down the source of the false reports. But they, numerous analysts and experts in American and European intelligence point to Russia as the prime suspect, noting that preventing NATO expansion is a centerpiece of the foreign policy of President Vladimir V. Putin, who invaded Georgia in 2008 largely to forestall that possibility.

In Crimea, eastern Ukraine and now Syria, Mr. Putin has flaunted a modernized and more muscular military. But he lacks the economic strength and overall might to openly confront NATO, the European Union or the United States. Instead, he has invested heavily in a program of “weaponized” information, using a variety of means to sow doubt and division. The goal is to weaken cohesion among member states, stir discord in their domestic politics and blunt opposition to Russia.

“Moscow views world affairs as a system of special operations, and very sincerely believes that it itself is an object of Western special operations,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, who helped establish the Kremlin’s information machine before 2008. “I am sure that there are a lot of centers, some linked to the state, that are involved in inventing these kinds of fake stories.”

The planting of false stories is nothing new; the Soviet Union devoted considerable resources to that during the ideological battles of the Cold War. Now, though, disinformation is regarded as an important aspect of Russian military doctrine, and it is being directed at political debates in target countries with far greater sophistication and volume than in the past.

The flow of misleading and inaccurate stories is so strong that both NATO and the European Union have established special offices to identify and refute disinformation, particularly claims emanating from Russia.

The Kremlin’s clandestine methods have surfaced in the United States, too, American officials say, identifying Russian intelligence as the likely source of leaked Democratic National Committee emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The Kremlin uses both conventional media — Sputnik, a news agency, and RT, a television outlet — and covert channels, as in Sweden, that are almost always untraceable.

Russia exploits both approaches in a comprehensive assault, Wilhelm Unge, a spokesman for the Swedish Security Service, said this year when presenting the agency’s annual report. “We mean everything from internet trolls to propaganda and misinformation spread by media companies like RT and Sputnik,” he said.

The fundamental purpose of dezinformatsiya, or Russian disinformation, experts said, is to undermine the official version of events — even the very idea that there is a true version of events — and foster a kind of policy paralysis.

Disinformation most famously succeeded in early 2014 with the initial obfuscation about deploying Russian forces to seize Crimea. That summer, Russia pumped out a dizzying array of theories about the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, blaming the C.I.A. and, most outlandishly, Ukrainian fighter pilots who had mistaken the airliner for the Russian presidential aircraft.

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Sweden’s defense minister, Peter Hultqvist, last month at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. He has tried to counteract disinformation that has threatened to sway public debate in Sweden about a proposed military partnership with NATO.CreditSaul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The cloud of stories helped veil the simple truth that poorly trained insurgents had accidentally downed the plane with a missile supplied by Russia.

Moscow adamantly denies using disinformation to influence Western public opinion and tends to label accusations of either overt or covert threats as “Russophobia.”

“There is an impression that, like in a good orchestra, many Western countries every day accuse Russia of threatening someone,” Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said at a recent ministry briefing.

Tracing individual strands of disinformation is difficult, but in Sweden and elsewhere, experts have detected a characteristic pattern that they tie to Kremlin-generated disinformation campaigns.

“The dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of context,” said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.

“Then the fake document becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-left or far-right-wing websites,” he said. “Those who rely on those sites for news link to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come from, but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision.”

Although the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Mr. Lindberg and others suggested. “What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are not building facts,” he said. “The underlying narrative is, ‘Don’t trust anyone.’”

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Debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over Ukraine in 2014 by insurgents using a missile supplied by Russia. One of Russia’s theories was that Ukrainian fighter pilots had downed the airliner after mistaking it for the Russian presidential aircraft.CreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times

The weaponization of information is not some project devised by a Kremlin policy expert but is an integral part of Russian military doctrine — what some senior military figures call a “decisive” battlefront.

“The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness,” Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, wrote in 2013.

A prime Kremlin target is Europe, where the rise of the populist right and declining support for the European Union create an ever more receptive audience for Russia’s conservative, nationalistic and authoritarian approach under Mr. Putin. Last year, the European Parliament accused Russia of “financing radical and extremist parties” in its member states, and in 2014 the Kremlin extended an $11.7 million loan to the National Front, the extreme-right party in France.

“The Russians are very good at courting everyone who has a grudge with liberal democracy, and that goes from extreme right to extreme left,” said Patrik Oksanen, an editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper group MittMedia. The central idea, he said, is that “liberal democracy is corrupt, inefficient, chaotic and, ultimately, not democratic.”

Another message, largely unstated, is that European governments lack the competence to deal with the crises they face, particularly immigration and terrorism, and that their officials are all American puppets.

In Germany, concerns over immigrant violence grew after a 13-year-old Russian-German girl said she had been raped by migrants. A report on Russian state television furthered the story. Even after the police debunked the claim, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, continued to chastise Germany.

In Britain, analysts said, the Kremlin’s English-language news outlets heavily favored the campaign for the country to leave the European Union, despite their claims of objectivity.

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A NATO military exercise in June in northern Poland. Around that time, articles on pro-Russia websites suggested that NATO planned to store nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe and would attack Russia from there without seeking approval from local capitals.CreditAdam Warzawa/European Pressphoto Agency

In the Czech Republic, alarming, sensational stories portraying the United States, the European Union and immigrants as villains appear daily across a cluster of about 40 pro-Russia websites.

During NATO military exercises in early June, articles on the websites suggested that Washington controlled Europe through the alliance, with Germany as its local sheriff. Echoing the disinformation that appeared in Sweden, the reports said NATO planned to store nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe and would attack Russia from there without seeking approval from local capitals.

A poll this summer by European Values, a think tank in Prague, found that 51 percent of Czechs viewed the United States’ role in Europe negatively, that only 32 percent viewed the European Union positively and that at least a quarter believed some elements of the disinformation.

“The data show how public opinion is changing thanks to the disinformation on those outlets,” said Jakub Janda, the think tank’s deputy director for public and political affairs. “They try to look like a regular media outlet even if they have a hidden agenda.”

Not all Russian disinformation efforts succeed. Sputnik news websites in various Scandinavian languages failed to attract enough readers and were closed after less than a year.

Both RT and Sputnik portray themselves as independent, alternative voices. Sputnik claims that it “tells the untold,” even if its daily report relies heavily on articles abridged from other sources. RT trumpets the slogan “Question More.”

Both depict the West as grim, divided, brutal, decadent, overrun with violent immigrants and unstable. “They want to give a picture of Europe as some sort of continent that is collapsing,” Mr. Hultqvist, the Swedish defense minister, said in an interview.

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Mr. Putin in 2013 at the state-funded television network Russia Today, now known as RT. The network’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, center, said it sought to provide “a perspective otherwise missing from the mainstream media echo chamber.”CreditPool photo by Yuri Kochetkov

RT often seems obsessed with the United States, portraying life there as hellish. On the day President Obama spoke at the Democratic National Convention, for example, it emphasized scattered demonstrations rather than the speeches. It defends the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, as an underdog maligned by the established news media.

Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor in chief, said the channel was being singled out as a threat because it offered a different narrative from “the Anglo-American media-political establishment.” RT, she said, wants to provide “a perspective otherwise missing from the mainstream media echo chamber.”

Moscow’s targeting of the West with disinformation dates to a Cold War program the Soviets called “active measures.” The effort involved leaking or even writing stories for sympathetic newspapers in India and hoping that they would be picked up in the West, said Professor Mark N. Kramer, a Cold War expert at Harvard.

The story that AIDS was a C.I.A. project run amok spread that way, and it poisons the discussion of the disease decades later. At the time, before the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, the Kremlin was selling communism as an ideological alternative. Now, experts said, the ideological component has evaporated, but the goal of weakening adversaries remains.

In Sweden recently, that has meant a series of bizarre forged letters and news articles about NATO and linked to Russia.

One forgery, on Defense Ministry letterhead over Mr. Hultqvist’s signature, encouraged a major Swedish firm to sell artillery to Ukraine, a move that would be illegal in Sweden. Ms. Nyh Radebo, his spokeswoman, put an end to that story in Sweden, but at international conferences, Mr. Hultqvist still faced questions about the nonexistent sales.

Russia also made at least one overt attempt to influence the debate. During a seminar in the spring, Vladimir Kozin, a senior adviser to the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank linked to the Kremlin and Russian foreign intelligence, argued against any change in Sweden’s neutral status.

“Do they really need to lose their neutral status?” he said of the Swedes. “To permit fielding new U.S. military bases on their territory and to send their national troops to take part in dubious regional conflicts?”

Whatever the method or message, Russia clearly wants to win any information war, as Dmitry Kiselyev, Russia’s most famous television anchor and the director of the organization that runs Sputnik, made clear recently.

Speaking this summer on the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Information Bureau, Mr. Kiselyev said the age of neutral journalism was over. “If we do propaganda, then you do propaganda, too,” he said, directing his message to Western journalists.

“Today, it is much more costly to kill one enemy soldier than during World War II, World War I or in the Middle Ages,” he said in an interview on the state-run Rossiya 24 network. While the business of “persuasion” is more expensive now, too, he said, “if you can persuade a person, you don’t need to kill him.”

Correction: 

An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of a spokesman for the Swedish Security Service. He is Wilhelm Unge, not Urme.

Correction: 

Because of an editing error, an article on Aug. 29 about the Kremlin’s reliance on disinformation to sow doubt, fear and discord in Europe and the United States referred incorrectly to coverage of the Democratic National Convention by a Russian television outfit, RT. It devoted little time to the speeches, focusing instead on scattered demonstrations, on the day President Obama spoke — not throughout the entire convention.

Follow Neil MacFarquhar on Twitter @NeilMacFarquhar.

Eva Sohlman contributed reporting from Stockholm, and Lincoln Pigman from Moscow.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Russia’s Powerful Weapon to Hurt Rivals: Falsehoods. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Contributors - The New York Times

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#####EOF##### N.S.A. Contractor Arrested in Possible New Theft of Secrets - The New York Times

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N.S.A. Contractor Arrested in Possible New Theft of Secrets

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The National Security Agency campus in Fort Meade, Md.CreditCreditPatrick Semansky/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. secretly arrested a former National Security Agency contractor in August and, according to law enforcement officials, is investigating whether he stole and disclosed highly classified computer code developed by the agency to hack into the networks of foreign governments.

The arrest raises the embarrassing prospect that for the second time in three years, a contractor for the consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton managed to steal highly damaging secret information while working for the N.S.A. In 2013, Edward J. Snowden, who was also a Booz Allen contractor, took a vast trove of documents from the agency that were later passed to journalists, exposing surveillance programs in the United States and abroad.

The contractor was identified as Harold T. Martin III of Glen Burnie, Md., according to a criminal complaint filed in late August and unsealed Wednesday. Mr. Martin, who at the time of his arrest was working as a contractor for the Defense Department after leaving the N.S.A., was charged with theft of government property and the unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents.

Mr. Martin, 51, was arrested during an F.B.I. raid on his home on Aug. 27. A neighbor, Murray Bennett, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that two dozen F.B.I. agents wearing military-style uniforms and armed with long guns stormed the house, and later escorted Mr. Martin out in handcuffs.

According to court documents, the F.B.I. discovered thousands of pages of documents and dozens of computers or other electronic devices at his home and in his car, a large amount of it classified. The digital media contained “many terabytes of information,” according to the documents. They also discovered classified documents that had been posted online, including computer code, officials said. Some of the documents were produced in 2014.

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Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, says the possible theft of classified government material is a reminder for vigilance..CreditCreditCarolyn Kaster/Associated Press

But more than a month later, the authorities cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Martin leaked the information, passed them on to a third party or whether he simply downloaded them.

When F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Martin after the raid, he initially denied having taken the documents and digital files, according to the complaint. But he later told the authorities that he knew he was not authorized to have the materials. He told the agents, according to the complaint, that “he knew what he had done was wrong and that he should not have done it because he knew it was unauthorized.”

The Justice Department unsealed the complaint — which was filed in United States District Court in Baltimore — after The New York Times notified the government it intended to publish a story about Mr. Martin.

In a brief statement issued Wednesday, lawyers for Mr. Martin said: “We have not seen any evidence. But what we know is that Hal Martin loves his family and his country. There is no evidence that he intended to betray his country.”

If true, the allegations against Mr. Martin are a setback for the Obama administration, which has sustained a series of disclosures of classified information. Along with Mr. Snowden’s revelations, the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks in 2010 disclosed hundreds of thousands of documents from the State and Defense Departments. In the aftermath of the Snowden disclosures, the administration took steps to put measures in place to prevent the unauthorized disclosures of classified information.

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, defended the Obama administration’s procedures for protecting national security information, arguing on Wednesday that since Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, agencies have tightened their security measures. He cited the creation of a task force that sets and monitors security requirements for agencies that handle classified information, and an overhaul of the government’s background check process, including adding more frequent updates.

The administration has also slashed the number of employees that have access to classified information, Mr. Earnest said, reducing it by 17 percent in the past couple of years.

“The president’s got a lot of confidence that the vast majority of people who serve this country in the national security arena, particularly our professionals in the intelligence community, are genuine American patriots,” Mr. Earnest said.

Another administration official said that investigators suspected that Mr. Martin began taking the material before Mr. Snowden’s actions became public, adding that reforms put into place after Mr. Snowden’s theft would not have stopped Mr. Martin.

“This is something that has its origins certainly before Snowden came on the scene, so many of the forms that have been in place since 2013 wouldn’t be relevant to stopping what happened,” the official said.

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Adm. Michael Rogers, the N.S.A. director, in March. He was brought in to restore the agency’s credibility and open it to more scrutiny.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

The information believed to have been stolen by Mr. Martin appears to be different in nature from Mr. Snowden’s theft, which included documents that described the depth and breadth of the N.S.A.’s surveillance.

Mr. Martin is suspected of taking the highly classified computer code developed by the agency to break into computer systems of adversaries like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, some of it outdated.

Several officials said that at the moment it did not look like a traditional espionage case, but the F.B.I. has not ruled anything out.

Mr. Martin does not fit any of the usual profiles of an “insider threat,” and one administration official said that investigators thought that he was not politically motivated — “not like a Snowden or someone who believes that what we were doing was illegal and wanted to publicize that.”

Mr. Martin, a Navy veteran, has degrees in economics and information systems and has been working for a decade on a Ph.D. in computer science. Neighbors described him as cordial and helpful but knew little about his work.

Law enforcement officials said that the F.B.I. was investigating the possibility that he had collected the files with no intention of passing them along. That by itself would represent a serious security vulnerability, but it would put Mr. Martin in the company of countless other senior Washington officials who have been caught taking classified information home. One of the officials described Mr. Martin as a hoarder.

Samuel R. Berger, a former national security adviser, stole classified documents from the National Archives and hid them under a construction trailer. Alberto R. Gonzales took home documents about the nation’s warrantless wiretapping program home with him while he was attorney general. As C.I.A. director, John M. Deutch kept classified information on his home computer.

Law enforcement officials are also looking into whether Mr. Martin was able to pass the information on, but are also entertaining a theory that he took it with that intention and then did not follow through.

But there are many unanswered questions about Mr. Martin’s case, including when and how the authorities learned this identity, and when they believe he began taking information. It is also not known if the case has any connection to the leak of classified N.S.A. code in August attributed to a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, or whether he had any role in a series of leaks of N.S.A. intercepts involving Japan, Germany and other countries that WikiLeaks has published since last year.

“We’re struggling to figure him out,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because no indictment has been publicly released.

For the N.S.A., which spent two years and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars repairing the damage done by Mr. Snowden, a second insider leaking the agency’s information would be devastating. The agency’s director, Adm. Michael Rogers, who previously ran the Navy’s Fleet Cyber Command, was brought in to restore the agency’s credibility, open it to more scrutiny and fix the problems that allowed Mr. Snowden to sweep up hundreds of thousands of documents.

It is also problematic for Booz Allen, which has built much of its business on providing highly technical services to the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies.

When the company “learned of the arrest of one of its employees by the FBI,” Booz Allen said in a statement on Wednesday, “we immediately reached out to the authorities to offer our total cooperation in their investigation, and we fired the employee. We continue to cooperate fully with the government on its investigation into this serious matter.”

Reporting was contributed by David E. Sanger from Cambridge, Mass., and Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti and Julie Hirschfeld Davis from Washington.

Follow The New York Times’s politics and Washington coverage on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the First Draft politics newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Arrest Suggests Another Breach of N.S.A. Secrets. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Mike Isaac

Mike Isaac

Mike Isaac is a technology reporter based in The Times's San Francisco bureau, where he covers Facebook, Uber and Twitter, among other companies​. More

Mike Isaac is a technology reporter based in The Times's San Francisco bureau, where he covers Facebook, Uber and Twitter, among other companies​.

Previously, Mr. Isaac was a senior editor reporting on social media companies for Re/Code and AllThingsD, and covered the decline and fall of once great technology giants like Hewlett-Packard and BlackBerry as a staff writer for WIRED. He began his career as a music journalist, writing for Paste Magazine and Performer.

After attending high school in Fort Worth, Tex., he eventually made his way to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he attended the University of California, Berkeley and graduated with a degree in English Literature​​​.

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#####EOF##### Opinion | Where Spying Is the Law - The New York Times

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Where Spying Is the Law

China requires its citizens and corporations to conduct espionage for the state. Did Huawei comply?

Yi-Zheng Lian

By Yi-Zheng Lian

Mr. Lian is a former lead writer and chief editor of the Hong Kong Economic Journal.

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A Huawei retail shop in Beijing.CreditCreditAndy Wong/Associated Press

Last week, the Supreme Court of British Columbia set a hearing date in extradition proceedings against Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, bringing her one step closer to being sent to the United States for trial. This is a make-or-break moment for Huawei’s international ambitions — and perhaps China’s — if only because the company is widely tipped to lead the world in soon-to-debut fifth-generation (5G) technologies.

Ms. Meng was arrested in Canada late last year on behalf of the American government, which has charged her with fraud and violating sanctions against Iran. But the United States’ beef against her goes deeper than any Iran connections and will have strategic significance well beyond her fate.

Huawei describes itself as a private, employee-owned business committed to bringing digital technology to the world. Some question that characterization, and the United States government sees the company as an arm of the authoritarian Chinese state, beholden to the interests of the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.). In that view, China’s objective is global dominance, and major Chinese companies like Huawei — nurtured strategically, richly resourced and now successfully embedded in the West — are commercial concerns on a political mission.

Apart from the charges against Ms. Meng, in January the United States filed an indictment against Huawei for multiple offenses, including the systematic theft of intellectual property. The American government has been warning allies that the company has developed critical capabilities to carry out cyberespionage worldwide. Congress has banned the use of Huawei products in federal projects for fear of compromising national security. (Huawei has responded by filing a suit last week against the United States over the restrictions.)

With these moves, the United States may be hoping to protect the interests of American tech companies, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong about the threat of Chinese spying. That’s real, and laid out in the open: Just look at China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law.

The N.I.L. is no standard security and spying legislation, concerned principally with preventing the leak of state secrets. Its main thrust isn’t protective; it’s proactive. “All organizations and citizens shall support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts according to the Law,” it says. (I know of no official English version; this is my translation, based partly on several others.) Another provision is even more explicit: The state institutions tasked with enforcing the N.I.L. — which also oversee all intelligence and espionage activities, civilian and military — “may demand that relevant organs, organizations and citizens provide necessary support, assistance and cooperation.” Spying for the state is a duty of the citizens and corporations of China under the law, much like paying taxes.

The N.I.L. offers enticements for compliance: “The state gives commendations and rewards to individuals and organizations that make major contributions to national intelligence efforts.” In its January indictment against Huawei, the United States claims that the company systematically gives bonuses to employees who pilfer intellectual property from foreign companies.

The N.I.L. leaves little room for opting out. “Obstructing the work” of China’s intelligence institutions is punishable and may be a criminal offense. Those institutions are entitled to “have priority use of, or can lawfully requisition the transportation or communications tools, premises and buildings of state organs, organizations or individuals” — and “when necessary,” set up “relevant work sites and equipment within them.” In other words, installing a back door in Huawei hardware to collect foreign intelligence would have a firm basis under Chinese law.

During an interview with CBS last month, Ren Zhengfei, the founder and chief executive officer of Huawei, was asked if he had “ever given any information to the Chinese government, in any way, shape or form?” Mr. Ren — who is also Ms. Meng’s father, as well as a veteran C.C.P. member and a former officer of the People’s Liberation Army — answered: “For the past 30 years, we have never done that, and the next 30 years to come, we will never do that.”

The Chinese government has come to the defense of Ms. Meng and Huawei, aggressively. Calling for Ms. Meng’s release in December, it threatened, “otherwise Canada must accept full responsibility for the serious consequences caused,” and later arrested two Canadians in China on espionage charges. When Canada, in turn, asked for the Canadians’ release, China accused it of double standards and “white supremacy.” Last week, China banned the import of canola from one of Canada’s biggest producers. The Chinese foreign ministry has also called the American charges against Ms. Meng and Huawei politically motivated and “immoral.”

Might quieter, behind-the-scene diplomatic maneuvering be more effective at saving Ms. Meng and helping Huawei? Probably. But a more discreet approach would be suitable only if Huawei were more or less an isolated case. If it isn’t, then when the Chinese government stands up visibly for an operative that is under threat, it is signaling to Chinese individuals and corporations the world over that it will also help them should they get into trouble while in the line of spying duty. This, too, is in keeping with the N.I.L., which provides that “the relevant state departments shall employ the necessary measures to protect or rescue” any person (or a close relative) who “has established cooperative relationships” with the state intelligence institutions and who is “threatened as a result of assisting” them.

The United States authorities are correct to point out that Huawei can perform critical commercial, military and diplomatic espionage; actually, Chinese law explicitly requires it to. Yet the law is so stunningly blatant that it may be difficult to take in fully, especially for some in the West.

Discounting the United States’ warnings, Britain, Germany, India and Italy seem to be leaning toward using Huawei hardware in their communications infrastructure. Some countries want to upgrade to 5G quickly and cheaply; Huawei can help with that; they see no obvious back door in its systems. In this, they are much like prey before a trap that’s empty and who doubt there ever was a trapper who laid it out.

Yi-Zheng Lian, a commentator on Hong Kong and Asian affairs, is a professor of economics at Yamanashi Gakuin University, in Kofu, Japan, and a contributing opinion writer.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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#####EOF##### Opinion | Chatbots Are a Danger to Democracy - The New York Times

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Chatbots Are a Danger to Democracy

We need to identify, disqualify and regulate chatbots before they destroy political speech.

By Jamie Susskind

Mr. Susskind is a lawyer.

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Who would bother to join a debate where every contribution is ripped to shreds within seconds?CreditCreditMel Evans/Associated Press

As we survey the fallout from the midterm elections, it would be easy to miss the longer-term threats to democracy that are waiting around the corner. Perhaps the most serious is political artificial intelligence in the form of automated “chatbots,” which masquerade as humans and try to hijack the political process.

Chatbots are software programs that are capable of conversing with human beings on social media using natural language. Increasingly, they take the form of machine learning systems that are not painstakingly “taught” vocabulary, grammar and syntax but rather “learn” to respond appropriately using probabilistic inference from large data sets, together with some human guidance.

Some chatbots, like the award-winning Mitsuku, can hold passable levels of conversation. Politics, however, is not Mitsuku’s strong suit. When asked “What do you think of the midterms?” Mitsuku replies, “I have never heard of midterms. Please enlighten me.” Reflecting the imperfect state of the art, Mitsuku will often give answers that are entertainingly weird. Asked, “What do you think of The New York Times?” Mitsuku replies, “I didn’t even know there was a new one.”

Most political bots these days are similarly crude, limited to the repetition of slogans like “#LockHerUp” or “#MAGA.” But a glance at recent political history suggests that chatbots have already begun to have an appreciable impact on political discourse. In the buildup to the midterms, for instance, an estimated 60 percent of the online chatter relating to “the caravan” of Central American migrants was initiated by chatbots.

In the days following the disappearance of the columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Arabic-language social media erupted in support for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was widely rumored to have ordered his murder. On a single day in October, the phrase “we all have trust in Mohammed bin Salman” featured in 250,000 tweets. “We have to stand by our leader” was posted more than 60,000 times, along with 100,000 messages imploring Saudis to “Unfollow enemies of the nation.” In all likelihood, the majority of these messages were generated by chatbots.

Chatbots aren’t a recent phenomenon. Two years ago, around a fifth of all tweets discussing the 2016 presidential election are believed to have been the work of chatbots. And a third of all traffic on Twitter before the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union was said to come from chatbots, principally in support of the Leave side.

It’s irrelevant that current bots are not “smart” like we are, or that they have not achieved the consciousness and creativity hoped for by A.I. purists. What matters is their impact.

In the past, despite our differences, we could at least take for granted that all participants in the political process were human beings. This no longer true. Increasingly we share the online debate chamber with nonhuman entities that are rapidly growing more advanced. This summer, a bot developed by the British firm Babylon reportedly achieved a score of 81 percent in the clinical examination for admission to the Royal College of General Practitioners. The average score for human doctors? 72 percent.

If chatbots are approaching the stage where they can answer diagnostic questions as well or better than human doctors, then it’s possible they might eventually reach or surpass our levels of political sophistication. And it is naïve to suppose that in the future bots will share the limitations of those we see today: They’ll likely have faces and voices, names and personalities — all engineered for maximum persuasion. So-called “deep fake” videos can already convincingly synthesize the speech and appearance of real politicians.

Unless we take action, chatbots could seriously endanger our democracy, and not just when they go haywire.

The most obvious risk is that we are crowded out of our own deliberative processes by systems that are too fast and too ubiquitous for us to keep up with. Who would bother to join a debate where every contribution is ripped to shreds within seconds by a thousand digital adversaries?

A related risk is that wealthy people will be able to afford the best chatbots. Prosperous interest groups and corporations, whose views already enjoy a dominant place in public discourse, will inevitably be in the best position to capitalize on the rhetorical advantages afforded by these new technologies.

And in a world where, increasingly, the only feasible way of engaging in debate with chatbots is through the deployment of other chatbots also possessed of the same speed and facility, the worry is that in the long run we’ll become effectively excluded from our own party. To put it mildly, the wholesale automation of deliberation would be an unfortunate development in democratic history.

Recognizing the threat, some groups have begun to act. The Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda Project provides reliable scholarly research on bot activity around the world. Innovators at Robhat Labs now offer applications to reveal who is human and who is not. And social media platforms themselves — Twitter and Facebook among them — have become more effective at detecting and neutralizing bots.

But more needs to be done.

A blunt approach — call it disqualification — would be an all-out prohibition of bots on forums where important political speech takes place, and punishment for the humans responsible. The Bot Disclosure and Accountability Bill introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, proposes something similar. It would amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to prohibit candidates and political parties from using any bots intended to impersonate or replicate human activity for public communication. It would also stop PACs, corporations and labor organizations from using bots to disseminate messages advocating candidates, which would be considered “electioneering communications.”

A subtler method would involve mandatory identification: requiring all chatbots to be publicly registered and to state at all times the fact that they are chatbots, and the identity of their human owners and controllers. Again, the Bot Disclosure and Accountability Bill would go some way to meeting this aim, requiring the Federal Trade Commission to force social media platforms to introduce policies requiring users to provide “clear and conspicuous notice” of bots “in plain and clear language,” and to police breaches of that rule. The main onus would be on platforms to root out transgressors.

We should also be exploring more imaginative forms of regulation. Why not introduce a rule, coded into platforms themselves, that bots may make only up to a specific number of online contributions per day, or a specific number of responses to a particular human? Bots peddling suspect information could be challenged by moderator-bots to provide recognized sources for their claims within seconds. Those that fail would face removal.

We need not treat the speech of chatbots with the same reverence that we treat human speech. Moreover, bots are too fast and tricky to be subject to ordinary rules of debate. For both those reasons, the methods we use to regulate bots must be more robust than those we apply to people. There can be no half-measures when democracy is at stake.

Jamie Susskind is a lawyer and a past fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is the author of “Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech.”

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#####EOF##### In a Stumble for Apple, a FaceTime Bug Lets iPhone Users Eavesdrop - The New York Times

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In a Stumble for Apple, a FaceTime Bug Lets iPhone Users Eavesdrop

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The FaceTime bug could also give a caller access to a live feed of the recipient’s camera.CreditCreditRoslan Rahman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

SAN FRANCISCO — The iPhone as an eavesdropping device? Watch out. It can happen.

On Monday, Twitter and other social networking sites lit up with anxious Apple users after the news site 9to5Mac reported on a strange glitch in the company’s iPhones. The issue: It turns out that an iPhone user can call another iPhone user and listen in on that person’s conversations through the device’s microphone — even if the recipient does not answer the call.

The problem was the result of a bug and involves Apple’s FaceTime app for placing video and audio calls over an internet connection. The bug could also give a caller access to a live feed of the recipient’s camera.

On Monday night, Apple said it had disabled Group FaceTime, the feature that was causing the glitch.

The glitch is embarrassing for Apple, which is set to report disappointing financial earnings on Tuesday. The Silicon Valley company has long positioned itself as a protector of user privacy offering more secure devices than its rivals.

“We’re aware of this issue and we have identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week,” Apple said in a statement.

The glitch has already spurred warnings from officials. In a statement issued late Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York urged FaceTime users to temporarily disable the app.

[Read how to disable FaceTime.]

“The FaceTime bug is an egregious breach of privacy that puts New Yorkers at risk,” he said.

I replicated the bug using two iPhones. I began by placing a FaceTime call to the other iPhone, and while the call was ringing, I swiped up on the screen, hit add person and added myself to the conversation. From there, I was able to listen in on the recipient’s microphone, even if the person did not pick up.

[Read about the tiny screw that illustrates why Apple probably won’t be assembling iPhones in the United States.]

If the recipient hit the volume-down or volume-up buttons during this process, the caller could also see a live video feed of the recipient’s front-facing iPhone camera.

How to handle this? Until the fix is released, iPhone users should go into the phone’s settings and disable FaceTime. Start by opening the Settings app, then tap FaceTime and toggle off FaceTime.

Follow Brian X. Chen on Twitter: @bxchen.

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#####EOF##### Afghan Troops Rush to Kunduz Amid Taliban Assault - The New York Times

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Afghan Troops Rush to Kunduz Amid Taliban Assault

By Mujib Mashal and Jawad Sukhanyar

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan government has rushed thousands of troops to the northern province of Kunduz in recent days as a fierce Taliban offensive has surrounded the regional capital city, officials said.

An entire battalion of the Afghan National Army was reported to be surrounded by the insurgents, and the authorities stripped troops from other provinces to reinforce Kunduz. President Ashraf Ghani delayed a trip to India on Monday for an emergency meeting with his military leaders and the American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John F. Campbell.

The assault on Kunduz city, which began Friday, is the cornerstone of the Taliban’s spring offensive. Already, the fighting is posing a dire test of the Afghan security forces, which struggled on multiple fronts last year after taking the lead from coalition forces.

Although the city came under threat last summer, when Taliban forces loyal to the commander Mullah Abdul Salam settled in to rule several of the outlying districts, Afghan officials seemed unprepared for the scope of the new assault over the weekend.

“Kunduz city is surrounded from four directions,” said Muhammad Yousuf Ayoubi, the provincial council chief. “If the government does not pay urgent attention, there is serious risk of it falling to the Taliban.”

The Taliban have targeted four districts surrounding the city, displacing nearly 2,000 families, according to provincial council members. The militants have effectively taken over Gortepa, a suburb of the capital, just about three miles from the provincial government offices, said Qadir Hussainkhel, a former head of the council. “It is a big part of the city,” he said. “The Taliban control it now.”

Of the other districts under fire, Imam Sahib, to the north, has been the worst hit. Large numbers of insurgents, including Uzbek, Tajik and Chechen militants, advanced on the district center from three directions, according to Amanuddin Qureshi, the district governor, who has fled the government center there.

At a military base in Imam Sahib, the insurgents have cut roads and supply routes, and one battalion of about 400 Afghan National Army soldiers is surrounded, with resupply possible only by air, according to Mr. Qureshi and two other local officials. But Gen. Dawlat Waziri, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry in Kabul, insisted that the battalion had not been stranded.

“If we don’t get reinforcements, the town will fall into the hands of the Taliban,” Mr. Qureshi warned in a telephone interview.

Sediq Sediqqi, the spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, maintained that reinforcements would be enough to push back the Taliban. In Imam Sahib, he said, a clearance operation begun late on Monday killed 27 Taliban members, including three commanders. He did not give government casualty numbers.

Despite concerns that the fighting this year would again be intense and require the full attention of the government, the new power-sharing administration under Mr. Ghani is a work in progress. The post of defense minister is still unfilled, and the army commander and most of the country’s provincial governors are temporary appointees.

The intensity of the violence around Kunduz sent the government scrambling to respond, with three high-level visits to Kunduz on Monday alone, and with confusion and dissension reported among some of the forces fighting back against the insurgents.

The provincial head of the Afghan Local Police, militia forces that have often been on the front lines of fighting against the Taliban, was scornful. “The army and the police don’t coordinate the operations with the A.L.P.,” said the forces’ leader, Sayed Dawood Hashemi. “We are used as firewood in the fighting.”

Despite requests for assistance from the security forces, one A.L.P. unit with dozens of men was forced to retreat from the neighborhood of Talawka, on the outskirts of Kunduz, allowing Taliban fighters to flood in, according to a member of the provincial council. Elsewhere, 26 A.L.P. fighters have been captured by the Taliban and two killed, Mr. Hashemi said.

Intense fighting started relatively early this year. Two weeks before the official start of their spring offensive, the Taliban attacked Afghan Army positions in remote Badakhshan Province, with hundreds of fighters overrunning Jurm District, abducting and killing dozens of soldiers, some of whom were reportedly beheaded. The government says it has begun a counteroffensive in Badakhshan, even as heavy fighting has been reported in several other northern provinces, including Sar-i-Pul, Jowzjan and Faryab.

With so many battles raging across the country, visiting army officials have told provincial council members in Kunduz that the best they can do is push back the enemy a bit, and that they cannot afford to sustain a longer operation, according to Mr. Ayoubi, the council chief in Kunduz.

In the meantime, irregular militias that were once funded by the United States as bastions against the Taliban have largely been on their own.

In Qala-i-Zal District, the 300 men under a commander named Nabi Gechi have been trying to fend off the Taliban advance. After five days of sustained small-arms and mortar fire from the insurgents, Mr. Gechi said, his militia was forced to retreat from one of its posts, with three men killed and a dozen wounded.

“The people of Qala-i-Zal are paying for the ammunition and food to supply us enough so we can stand up to the Taliban attacks,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A3 of the New York edition with the headline: Afghan Troops Rush to Kunduz as Taliban Flood In. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### 2.5 Million More People Potentially Exposed in Equifax Breach - The New York Times

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2.5 Million More People Potentially Exposed in Equifax Breach

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Equifax has been reeling since its announcement last month that hackers exploited its website to extract sensitive personal information on potentially millions of consumers.CreditCreditTami Chappell/Reuters

Millions more people were affected by Equifax’s data breach than the credit bureau initially estimated, Equifax said on Monday.

The company increased its estimate on the number of Americans whose personal information was potentially exposed to 145.5 million, some 2.5 million more than it had previously disclosed.

The additional accounts were found during a forensic review by Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm hired by Equifax to investigate the attack, according to a company statement.

Equifax has been reeling since its announcement last month that hackers exploited a vulnerability in its website software to access its systems and extract sensitive personal information of millions of consumers. The material that was stolen included names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some instances, driver’s license numbers.

Richard F. Smith, who stepped down last week as Equifax’s chief executive, is scheduled to testify on Tuesday before a congressional subcommittee that is investigating the theft and Equifax’s response to it. It is the first of four congressional hearings he is scheduled to speak at this week.

“I am deeply sorry that this occurred,” Mr. Smith said in prepared remarks released on Monday. “Equifax was entrusted with Americans’ private data and we let them down.”

Paulino do Rego Barros Jr., a longtime Equifax executive who was promoted after Mr. Smith’s departure to serve as the company’s interim chief executive, said that he was advised on Sunday that Mandiant had completed the forensic phase of its investigation and found the additional accounts that were potentially at risk.

“I directed that the results be promptly released,” Mr. Barros said in a statement. “Our priorities are transparency and improving support for consumers.”

Equifax said it would mail written notices to the 2.5 million newly identified people.

Mandiant’s review found no evidence that the thieves gained access to databases outside the United States, Equifax said. But 8,000 Canadian consumers were affected, and an investigation into whether the data of some British consumers was exposed remains in progress, the company said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: Equifax Breach Exposed Data From 2.5 Million More People Than First Disclosed. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Losses at Options Unit Hurt Continental Illinois - The New York Times
About the Archive

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems. Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

October 27, 1987, Page 00001 The New York Times Archives

In a risky acquisition gone awry, the Continental Illinois Corporation said today that it would take a $90 million charge in the fourth quarter for losses at its affiliate, First Options of Chicago Inc.

As a result the company may report a ''moderate'' loss over all.

First Options, the nation's largest clearing house for options trading, suffered huge losses during last week's turmoil in the financial markets. The firm, which guarantees that its customers trades will be settled, found that because of the market's plunge last Monday, many of its customers could not meet their margin calls, forcing First Options to step in to settle with cash or the underlying securities to complete the trade. Greater Chaos Avoided

If First Options had not stepped in with its own funds, Continental said, many investors would not have received the money due them, throwing the markets into greater chaos. However, First Options is required by regulatory agencies and exchanges to maintain a certain level of capital. To maintain these levels after Oct. 19's extraordinary losses, First Options required an hefty infusion of capital from its parent company.

On Tuesday, Oct. 20, Continental infused it with an estimated $625 million. But in doing so, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency charged that Continental had violated the conditions it set when it gave Continental permission to acquire First Options last year, by lending too much to a single customer. But Continental for its part claimed that it was in ''overall compliance.''

When Continental Bank learned that the Comptroller believed it had exceeded its limits last Tuesday, First Options repaid the excessive amount, totaling an estimated $250,000, to the bank. In turn, however, the bank's parent company, Continental Illinois, loaned roughly the same amount to First Options.

Continental bought First Options last year for about $135 million. The acquisition, intended to raise Continental's fee income, was criticized by some who believed that it exposed the bank to losses in the highly volatile options market. Complying With the Limits

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Continental said it had entered into a consent agreement with the Comptroller providing that the bank ''will continue to comply with the limits imposed on its investment in, and advances to First Options provided in the Comptroller's approval of Continental's 1986 acquisition of First Options.''

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#####EOF##### Mark Mazzetti

Mark Mazzetti

Mark Mazzetti is a Washington investigative correspondent, a job he assumed after covering national security from The Times's Washington bureau for 10 years. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. More

Mark Mazzetti is a Washington investigative correspondent, a job he assumed after covering national security from The Times's Washington bureau for 10 years. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia.

In 2009, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the intensifying violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Washington's response. The previous year, he was a Pulitzer finalist for revelations about the C.I.A.'s detention and interrogation program.

He is the author of "The Way of the Knife," a New York Times best-selling account of the secret wars waged by the C.I.A. and Pentagon since the Sept. 11 attacks. He is a three-time recipient of the George Polk award.

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#####EOF##### Adriana Balsamo

Adriana Balsamo

Recent and archived work by Adriana Balsamo for The New York Times

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#####EOF##### The Facebooker Who Friended Obama - The New York Times

Last November, Mark Penn, then the chief strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton, derisively said Barack Obama’s supporters “look like Facebook.”

Chris Hughes takes that as a compliment.

Mr. Hughes, 24, was one of four founders of Facebook. In early 2007, he left the company to work in Chicago on Senator Obama’s new-media campaign. Leaving behind his company at such a critical time would appear to require some cognitive dissonance: political campaigns, after all, are built on handshakes and persuasion, not computer servers, and Mr. Hughes has watched, sometimes ruefully, as Facebook has marketed new products that he helped develop.

“It was overwhelming for the first two months,” he recalled. “It took a while to get my bearings.”

But in fact, working on the Obama campaign may have moved Mr. Hughes closer to the center of the social networking phenomenon, not farther away.

The campaign’s new-media strategy, inspired by popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook, has revolutionized the use of the Web as a political tool, helping the candidate raise more than two million donations of less than $200 each and swiftly mobilize hundreds of thousands of supporters before various primaries.

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The centerpiece of it all is My.BarackObama.com, where supporters can join local groups, create events, sign up for updates and set up personal fund-raising pages. “If we did not have online organizing tools, it would be much harder to be where we are now,” Mr. Hughes said.

Mr. Obama, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, credits the Internet’s social networking tools with a “big part” of his primary season success.

“One of my fundamental beliefs from my days as a community organizer is that real change comes from the bottom up,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “And there’s no more powerful tool for grass-roots organizing than the Internet.”

Now Mr. Hughes and other campaign aides are applying the same social networking tools to try to win the general election. This time, however, they must reach beyond their base of young, Internet-savvy supporters.

By early April, Mr. Obama’s new-media team was already planning for the election by expanding its online phone-calling technology. In mid-May, to keep volunteers busy as the primaries played out, the campaign started a nationwide voter registration drive. And in late June, after Senator Clinton bowed out of the race, the millions of people on the Obama campaign’s e-mail lists were asked to rally her supporters as well as undecided voters by hosting “Unite for Change” house parties across the country. Nearly 4,000 parties were held.

The campaign’s successful new-media strategy is already being studied as a playbook for other candidates, including the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain.

“Their use of social networks will guide the way for future campaigns,” Peter Daou, Mrs. Clinton’s Internet director, said at a recent political technology conference. Mr. Daou called Mr. Obama’s online outreach “amazing.”

Photo
Chris Hughes, 24, a founder of Facebook, left the company to develop Senator Barack Obama’s Web presence. Credit Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

The heart of the campaign’s online strategy is a teeming corner of Mr. Obama’s headquarters two blocks from the Chicago River, a crowded space that looks more like an Internet start-up company than a campaign war room. During a visit in late May, a bottle of whiskey sat, almost empty, atop a refrigerator (there had been plenty of victories to celebrate lately, a staff member explained).

Sitting amid a cluster of cubicles, Mr. Hughes, whose title is “online organizing guru,” handles the My.BarackObama.com site, which is known within the campaign as MyBo. Other staff members maintain Mr. Obama’s presence on Facebook (where he has one million supporters), purchase online advertising, respond to text messages from curious voters, produce videos and e-mail millions of supporters.

Before helping build Facebook, the social network of choice for 70 million Americans, the fresh-faced and sandy-haired Mr. Hughes, who grew up in Hickory, N.C., went to boarding school at Andover, where he joined the Democratic Club and the student government. In the fall of 2002, he went to Harvard, where he majored in history and literature. He and a roommate, Mark Zuckerberg — now the chief executive of Facebook — shared a room that was “just about as small as my cubby at work is these days,” Mr. Hughes said.

Mr. Zuckerberg and another Facebook co-founder dropped out in 2004 to work on the site full time, but Mr. Hughes graduated in 2006 before venturing to Silicon Valley.

In February 2007, after showing interest in Mr. Obama’s candidacy and being reassured that the campaign’s new-media operation would be more than “just a couple Internet guys in a corner,” he left Facebook, where he has stock options that are potentially worth tens of millions of dollars, and moved to Chicago, where he lives — and dresses — like any other recent college graduate. “Cabs are a luxury,” he said.

As supporters started to join MyBo in early 2007, Mr. Hughes brought a growth strategy, borrowed from Facebook’s founding principles: keep it real, and keep it local. Mr. Hughes wanted Mr. Obama’s social network to mirror the off-line world the same way that Facebook seeks to, because supporters would foster more meaningful connections by attending neighborhood meetings and calling on people who were part of their daily lives. The Internet served as the connective tissue.

While many candidates reach their supporters through the Web, the social networking features of MyBo allow supporters to reach one another.

Mr. Hughes’s abrupt shift from Facebook pioneer to campaign aide was not easy. In the lonely months before the Iowa caucus, he grappled with the small scale of his new social network, measuring its membership by the thousands rather than the millions he was accustomed to. He had to learn mystifying political shorthand (VAN, for voter file management; NGP, for the donor and volunteer database) and figure out how campaigns operate. Eventually, he grew comfortable.

At first, his main focus was a single state. Throughout last summer and fall, the prevailing attitude was, “What can you do for Iowa today?” Mr. Hughes recalled.

Mr. Obama’s win in the Iowa caucuses drove new supporters to the MyBo site in droves. Using the campaign’s online toolkit, energized volunteers laid the groundwork for field workers.

So far, MyBo has attracted 900,000 members, although aides play down the raw numbers.

“The point is not to have a million people” signed up, said Joe Rospars, the campaign’s new-media director, although he does expect to have well over a million signed up on MyBo by November. “The point is to be able to chop up that million-person list into manageable chunks and organize them.”

In some primary and caucus states, volunteers used the Internet to start organizing themselves months before the campaign staff arrived. In Texas on March 4, Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote, but Mr. Obama came away with a lead of five delegates, thanks to a caucus win. Caucuses are a test of organizational strength, and Mr. Obama’s team used database technology to track 100,000 Texas volunteers and put them to work. This permitted campaign staff members to “skip Steps 1, 2 and 3,” Mr. Hughes said.

Photo
Barack Obama with some campaign essentials: the Secret Service, his staff and his BlackBerry. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

So maybe the Obama core does “look like Facebook.” Mr. Penn’s remark, made at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa and reported by The Politico, was cited by both Mr. Rospars and Mr. Hughes in separate interviews.

Virtual phone banks greatly benefited Mr. Obama. During the primaries, volunteers could sign in online, receive a list of phone numbers and make calls from home. The volunteers made hundreds of thousands of calls last winter and spring. At the end of June, the Obama campaign began carefully opening up its files of voters to online supporters, making it easier to find out which Democratic-leaning neighbors to call and which registered-independent doors to knock on.

One goal is to drive online energy into in-person support. From January to April, for instance, the Obama campaign spent $3 million on online advertising to steer would-be voters to their polling places with online tools that tell people where to vote. The locators “are hard to build, but once you build them, they have a very high return on investment,” Mr. Hughes said.

Much of the technology in the Obama toolbox was pioneered by Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign. “We were like the Wright brothers,” said Joe Trippi, the Web mastermind of the Dean campaign. The Obama team, he added, “skipped Boeing, Mercury, Gemini — they’re Apollo 11, only four years later.”

Mr. Rospars and other former Dean aides formed a consulting firm, Blue State Digital, to refine their techniques. The Obama campaign purchased the backbone of MyBo from Blue State and has set out to improve it. “It’s still TheFacebook,” Mr. Hughes said, comparing Mr. Obama’s current site to the earliest and narrowest version of Facebook. “It’s still very, very rough around the edges.”

Last month, acknowledging that attacks during the general election are likely to be more vociferous, the Obama campaign tried to capitalize on its network by creating a Web page, FightTheSmears.com. Through that site, the campaign hopes that supporters will act as a truth squad working to untangle accusations, as bloggers have informally in other campaigns and as many did when CBS reported on President Bush’s National Guard service in 2004.

People who have posted on the site have already taken up five rumors, including that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States (a birth certificate was displayed) and that he does not put his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance (the site links to a YouTube video of him doing so).

Republican strategists say, wryly, that Senator McCain’s 2000 campaign was innovative in its use of technology. (The candidate held a groundbreaking virtual fund-raiser and enabled supporters to sign up online.) But that was back when Mr. McCain ran as an outsider; as the presumptive nominee, he is no longer an upstart. His social network, called McCainSpace and part of JohnMcCain.com, is “virtually impossible to use and appears largely abandoned,” said Adam Ostrow, the editor of Mashable, a blog about social networking.

By all accounts, Mr. McCain is not the BlackBerry-wielding politician that Mr. Obama is. But he has given credit to what he calls Mr. Obama’s “excellent use of the Internet,” saying at a news conference last month that “we are working very hard at that as well.” The McCain campaign recently reintroduced its Web site and hired new bloggers to broaden its online presence.

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican strategist who was the Webmaster for President Bush’s 2004 campaign, said that a campaign’s culture largely determines its digital strategy. The McCain campaign “could hire the best people, build the best technology, and adopt the best tactics” on the Internet. “But it would have to be in sync with the candidate and the campaign,” Mr. Ruffini said.

Mr. Hughes and other Obama aides say that their candidate gravitates naturally toward social networking, so much so that he even filled out his own Facebook profile two years ago. Mr. Obama has pledged that if he is elected, he will hire a chief technology officer; Mr. Hughes’s face lights up at the thought.

Other administrations have adapted to the Internet, “but they haven’t valued it,” he said.

Mr. Hughes has not decided whether to return to Facebook, and the decision does hinge in part on the fate of the campaign. But the lessons he has learned in political life seem to reinforce those learned in Silicon Valley.

“You can have the best technology in the world,” he said, “but if you don’t have a community who wants to use it and who are excited about it, then it has no purpose.”

Correction: July 14, 2008

An article last Monday about Senator Barack Obama’s new-media presidential campaign misstated the name of the company that provided the software for his donor and volunteer database. It is NGP Software, not N.P.G.

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#####EOF##### Where Was the Wise Man? - The New York Times
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Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, is a major player at Citigroup, but his exact role is unclear. He and his job have come under scrutiny since the bank lost tens of billions. Credit Jacob Silberberg for The New York Times

EVERY month or so, Citigroup invites a select group of clients to dine with a singular and very special host: Robert E. Rubin, the former Treasury secretary who, for the last nine years, has been the banking giant’s self-described consigliere.

These discreet affairs are held in the executive dining room of Citigroup’s Park Avenue headquarters, but it’s a movable feast. Mr. Rubin has presided at similar soirees overseas and in the bank’s Lower Manhattan offices, where luminaries like Bill Clinton and Alan Greenspan have joined him to discuss the global economy.

“With Bill, I was a little bit like an unskilled Larry King,” Mr. Rubin says. “It’s less of a conversation with him than with Alan.”

That kind of self-deprecating observation is vintage Rubin, and it plays down his own substantial celebrity as a corporate and political wise man. When a Who’s Who of South Korean government officials, business leaders and clients gathered last September in Seoul to hear Mr. Rubin speak, they greeted him as though he were a rock star.

“There was a reception before the big event, and people just wanted to shake his hand or get a photo with him,” says Michael Schlein, who, as head of international franchise management for Citigroup, attended the meeting.

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Mr. Rubin is still regarded with affection in South Korea because of the pivotal role he played in helping the country survive the Asian economic crisis a decade ago. But now, closer to home, another financial crisis is creating a very different type of notoriety for Mr. Rubin. The housing and credit mess here has cost Citigroup nearly $40 billion, forced the exit of its chief executive, Charles O. Prince III, and led to persistent rumors inside the bank that Mr. Rubin might soon be stepping down as well.

Mr. Rubin and others at Citigroup are quick to dismiss any talk of departure, but one senior insider says Mr. Rubin may soon change his job title in order to clarify a clutch of duties that have always been ambiguous. He currently serves as chairman of the executive committee; his new title hasn’t been decided.

“It’s not under consideration,” Mr. Rubin insists.

Titles aside, shareholders and analysts who have watched Citigroup run off the rails continue to ask a logical question about a financial statesman widely considered to be an astute judge of risk throughout a long and storied career: Where was Bob?

While many Wall Street luminaries have come in for criticism as a result of the financial breakdown, Mr. Rubin is part of an Olympian duo — along with Mr. Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman — whose legacies are most clearly threatened by the mess.

“The board is still pretty tightly behind Bob,” said one outsider who has frequent discussions with Citigroup officials and requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. “The second layer of executives at the company are very disappointed with him for not focusing more, for not doing a lot more.”

At Citigroup’s annual meeting last week, Joe Condon, a retired Citibank regional manager in New York, posed a similar question. “What kind of advice did he give to Mr. Prince?” asked Mr. Condon, who spent 38 years at the bank. “Citigroup bankers are losing their jobs, and Bob Rubin is collecting $10 million, $15 million a year.”

Answers to these questions are complex and laced with contradictions, which neatly fits Mr. Rubin’s personality. Over the last 43 years, he has glided between Washington and Wall Street, emerging as an outspoken Democrat supporting liberal candidates like Walter F. Mondale and Michael S. Dukakis even as he earned tens of millions of dollars as a top executive of Goldman Sachs.

As an economic adviser to President Clinton in 1993 and 1994 and as Treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999, he supported tax hikes and spending cuts to reduce the deficit, pleasing investors but disappointing liberals who wanted more money for social programs. And as chairman of the executive committee of Citigroup, he’s played the incongruous role of official éminence grise, advising top executives and serving on the board while, he says, steering clear of day-to-day management.

“By the time I finished at Treasury, I decided I never wanted operating responsibility again,” Mr. Rubin, 69, said during a two-hour interview in his office. Sitting in a red-cloth chair and propped against a thick book to support a bad back, he made it plain that responsibility for Citigroup’s staggering losses can’t be laid at his feet.

“People know I was concerned about the markets,” he says. “Clearly, there were things wrong. But I don’t know of anyone who foresaw a perfect storm, and that’s what we’ve had here.”

“I don’t feel responsible, in light of the facts as I knew them in my role,” he adds.

But did he make mistakes?

“I’ve thought a lot about that,” he responds. “I honestly don’t know. In hindsight, there are a lot of things we’d do differently. But in the context of the facts as I knew them and my role, I’m inclined to think probably not.”

The exact contours of Mr. Rubin’s Citigroup duties are elusive, but they hinge on using his stature to attract clients and deal with regulators, while also tapping his experience in strategic matters. A paradox in all of this is that he maintains great sway at Citigroup while exercising no direct operational responsibilities.

Until mid-2007, the board-level executive committee that he leads met only several times a year, but Sanford I. Weill, who as chief executive lured Mr. Rubin to the company in 1999, says they spoke practically every day during his tenure. Mr. Rubin also made himself readily available to Mr. Prince and others seeking advice.

“It’s a little like visiting Yoda,” says Raymond J. McGuire, Citigroup’s co-head of global investment banking. “You go and get a dose of wisdom.”

Photo
John Reed, left, and Sanford Weill, center, then the chief executives of Citigroup, welcome Robert Rubin to the Citi board in 1999. He became chairman of the executive committee, but only last year did it begin to meet frequently. Credit Richard Drew/Associated Press

That arrangement worked fine when Citigroup prospered — its shares more than doubled between 2002 and early 2007 — but over the last year, as the bank’s earnings and stock price withered, Mr. Rubin has endured much more critical scrutiny. At Citigroup’s annual conference with analysts and institutional investors on May 9, he is likely to be on the receiving end of more hostile questions.

MODEST and genial to a fault, Mr. Rubin is also proud and protective of his sterling reputation. Adorning a wall behind his desk is a framed Time cover from 1999 hailing his role on what the magazine called the “Committee to Save the World”; the cover about the Asian economic crisis features him alongside his Treasury deputy, Lawrence H. Summers, and Mr. Greenspan, then the Fed chairman.

Addressing the current round of criticism, Mr. Rubin makes a passionate defense without sounding the least bit defensive.

“There is no way you would know what was going on with a risk book unless you’re directly involved with the trading arena,” he says. “We had highly experienced, highly qualified people running the operation.”

That still doesn’t satisfy experts like Frank Partnoy, a former banker at Morgan Stanley who is now a law professor at the University of San Diego. He says he long admired Mr. Rubin as a “smart guy up against powerful forces in Washington who was consistently a voice of reason.” But he says Citigroup’s huge losses have shaken that faith.

Mr. Partnoy recently had his corporate finance students listen to a conference call from last November in which Mr. Rubin tried to explain Citigroup’s myriad financial woes and what role he played at the bank. “You could feel the air go out of the room as this incredibly well-respected guy struggled to answer,” Mr. Partnoy says of that class. “It was almost poignant.”

LONG before he became a star in Washington, Bob Rubin was renowned on Wall Street. It wasn’t just his intellect that made him stand out, his pedigree from Harvard College and Yale Law School, or his success at the Street’s most competitive firm, Goldman Sachs.

“What’s unique about Bob is a combination of rare intellect and rare temperament. That’s what sets him apart,” says Roger Altman, a veteran of Wall Street who has known Mr. Rubin for nearly 30 years and served with him in the early years of the Clinton administration. “He’s self-effacing, always calm, with a low-ego style.”

Colleagues say Mr. Rubin often prefaces his opinions by saying, “I don’t know much about this,” and then proceeds to lay out his argument by asking questions of those around him.

As he worked his way up from Goldman’s arbitrage trading desk to the corner office, “he was very accepting of debate and disagreement,” says Stephen Friedman, who met Mr. Rubin shortly after joining Goldman Sachs in 1966 and eventually became co-chairman of the firm with him from 1990 to 1992. Nodding toward Mr. Rubin’s acute sense of the volatility of the markets, he adds that the only thing Mr. Rubin “is dismissive of is people who are certain of things that are inherently uncertain.”

Mr. Rubin encouraged Goldman to move into more treacherous markets like proprietary trading and commodities trading. Even so, he now says he was always concerned about the dangers posed by risky futures and derivatives trades, having seen how the pell-mell use of futures contracts exacerbated the 1987 stock market crash.

Shortly before leaving Goldman to head up President Clinton’s National Economic Council, Mr. Rubin says, he met with Richard B. Fisher, the chairman of Morgan Stanley, to discuss the idea of imposing stricter margin requirements on futures trading. Mr. Rubin says the idea died after the Chicago Board of Trade told him “we will make sure Goldman Sachs never trades another future on the C.B.O.T. if this went ahead.”

A spokeswoman for the CME Group, which now owns the Chicago Board, contends that “Goldman was and continues to be a valued customer and we would never deny access to our markets.”

At the Treasury Department, Mr. Rubin threaded a moderate stance on the always-controversial issue of market regulation, navigating between conservative free marketeers like Mr. Greenspan who wanted to streamline regulation and more liberal advocates demanding tighter monitoring of the securities industry.

At the same time, Mr. Rubin pushed developing countries to open their markets to foreign competition while privatizing state-dominated economies. This approach eventually became known as the Washington consensus and gained deep traction in Latin America, East Asia and Eastern Europe, regions where Citigroup later aggressively pursued new business.

Overseas, Mr. Rubin’s legacy remains controversial nearly a decade after he left the Treasury. In Latin America, populist leaders have come to power in part by arguing that privatization and market-oriented reforms greatly enriched the elite but didn’t benefit the rest of the population.

Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, suggests Mr. Rubin and other Clinton officials were more attuned to the impact of free trade on American workers than on their overseas counterparts. “Free trade does promote growth but promotes inequality,” he says. “In terms of helping victims of that process, they did more domestically than internationally.”

Looking back, Mr. Rubin says: “We were in favor of trade liberalization and also very focused on for the potential for trade to increase inequality and job dislocation.” He adds that, “if we did it again, we would be more focused on social safety nets for the poor during the crises.”

With the economy booming and the market soaring in the mid- to late 1990s, Washington wasn’t focused on new regulation. The trend had long been in the opposite direction, as commercial banks and investment banks gradually moved closer together, eroding the Glass-Steagall legal restrictions enacted in the 1930s to rein in banking excesses. Mr. Rubin in theory supported the legislation to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act but was concerned that it would strengthen the Fed’s powers at the expense of the Treasury. It was passed and signed into law under his successor, Mr. Summers.

Despite the views of Mr. Greenspan, others in their inner circle say Mr. Rubin charted his own philosophic course about regulation.

Photo
Mr. Rubin and Alan Greenspan at a Congressional hearing in 1995. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

“He was consistently more skeptical that market discipline alone is sufficient and more often in favor of using regulation to get a better balance between innovation and stability,” says Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who served as a senior Treasury official under Mr. Rubin and Mr. Summers.

But on at least one occasion, Mr. Rubin lined up with Mr. Summers as well as Mr. Greenspan to block a 1998 proposal by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that would have effectively moved many derivatives out of the shadows and made them subject to regulation.

Derivatives are privately negotiated and often complex financial contracts theoretically designed to limit risk. Their value is derived from an underlying basket of assets, like stocks, bonds or loans. Advocates say that derivatives, used wisely, foster economic activity. Critics contend that as derivatives trading has boomed over the last decade, it has led to high-octane speculation more akin to gambling than to sensible hedging of financial risk.

Opaque trading and hard-to-value derivatives tied to mortgage loans and other forms of credit have been one of the underlying causes of the current financial crisis. One former commodities commission official argues that a different approach to derivatives regulation in 1998 would have helped avert the worst of today’s credit crisis.

“Stopping this let the momentum build and led to subprime as well as soaring commodity prices today because unregulated derivatives trading soared after that,” says Michael Greenberger, then director of trading and markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor of law at the University of Maryland.

At an April 21, 1998, meeting with Brooksley Born, the chairwoman of the commodities commission, Mr. Rubin made no secret of his feelings about her proposal. “It was controlled anger. He was very tough,” Mr. Greenberger recalls. “I was at several meetings with him, and I’ve never seen him like that before or after.” Ms. Born didn’t return calls for comment.

Mr. Rubin says he was against the proposal because he feared it could create chaos in the markets, rather than actually improve oversight of derivatives. He says he believes that the financial system could benefit from better regulation of derivatives, perhaps in the form of more disclosure and new rules requiring individuals and firms to put more money down when they trade.

But during his time in Washington, he says, “the politics would have made this impossible. Even if I’d taken a placard and walked up and down Pennsylvania Avenue saying the financial system would come to an end without strict regulation of derivatives, I would have had no traction.”

Mr. Greenberger is unbowed: “What do we have now, if not chaos in the markets?”

WHEN Mr. Rubin left Washington and returned to New York in 1999, he weighed the pros and cons of his next career move. “I’d had the ultimate responsibility both at Goldman Sachs and at Treasury, and I didn’t want that again,” he wrote in “In an Uncertain World,” his memoir. “I was at a stage in my life where I wanted to try to live a little differently.”

That meant, he says, a position that didn’t carry direct management responsibilities and allowed him to serve as elder financial statesman — albeit one who was lavishly paid. Since arriving at Citigroup, Mr. Rubin has been awarded compensation worth at least $126.1 million, according to Equilar, a research firm. That would place him firmly in the top 25 percent of earners if compared to the chief executives of Fortune 500 companies.

One person who insisted on anonymity because he remains close to Mr. Rubin said there was one central issue the former Treasury secretary didn’t consider when he signed on at Citigroup: “What if you a take a nonoperational role and something happens there and people blame you?”

According to Mr. Rubin’s many friends and supporters in Washington and on Wall Street, that’s exactly the position he finds himself in.

“Bob has been unfairly taken to task, I really do believe that,” says Richard D. Parsons, the chairman of Time Warner and a Citigroup board member. “He made an explicit deal when he came aboard. You can’t say this happened on his watch because this wasn’t his watch.”

Indeed, Mr. Rubin’s role at Citigroup has been unique. His contract stipulated that he wouldn’t have specific business responsibilities and was free to use his perch to sound off on public policy — even if his views diverged from those of the bank.

And when it comes to the current financial mess at Citigroup and elsewhere, Mr. Rubin says his conscience is clear. “Looking back, you have to say a lot of people made a lot of mistakes,” he says. “I don’t blame people for being angry. They lost a lot of money.”

Although Mr. Rubin regularly points out that he didn’t directly oversee any of Citigroup’s businesses, bankers inside the company say that he didn’t need such authority to wield tremendous influence.

“He is like the Wizard of Oz behind Citigroup, he is the guy pulling on all the strings,” said one Citigroup banker who was not authorized to speak publicly about the situation. “He certainly was the guy deferred to on key strategic decisions and certain key business decisions vis-à-vis risk.”

“When you have responsibility with no accountability, that is a very dangerous thing on Wall Street,” this banker added.

A LOOK at some of Citigroup’s recent endeavors offers a window onto Mr. Rubin’s role at the bank.

Early in 2005, Citigroup’s board asked the C.E.O., Mr. Prince, and several top lieutenants to develop a growth strategy for its fixed-income business. Mr. Rubin peppered colleagues with questions as they formulated the plan, according to current and former Citigroup employees. With Citigroup falling behind Wall Street rivals like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, Mr. Rubin pushed for the bank to increase its activity in high-growth areas like structured credit.

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In 1995, Mr. Rubin became President Clinton’s second Treasury secretary. Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

He also encouraged Mr. Prince to raise the bank’s tolerance for risk, provided it also upgraded oversight. Then, according to current and former employees, he helped sell the proposal to his fellow directors.

On the surface, this appeared to be a sensible strategy. In hindsight, the timing could not have been worse: Citigroup was bulking up in mortgage-linked securities in 2006, not long before that market cratered.

Mr. Rubin, who warned that Wall Street disregarded market risks for years, now says the sudden collapse of the mortgage market caught him off guard. But he also says that the way that Citigroup executed its expansion into new credit markets was lacking. “We could afford to seek more opportunities through intelligent risk taking,” he says. “The key word is ‘intelligent.’ ”

In early 2007, Citigroup belatedly began trimming its staggering exposure to the crumbling market for mortgage-backed securities. Though just footsteps from Mr. Prince’s office, Mr. Rubin said he was unaware of the specific problems posed by that stockpile until last July. That was when Mr. Prince first convened daily risk-management meetings for Citigroup’s highest-ranking executives.

Mr. Rubin either attended those meetings with Mr. Prince or called in from the road for briefings. Participants at the meetings said Mr. Rubin helped shape the firm’s response to the mortgage crisis. Mr. Prince was not available for comment.

“Bob was the elder statesman,” says Gary L. Crittenden, Citigroup’s chief financial officer. “He could reflect on his experiences at Goldman and the Treasury and provide advice about how a prior situation paralleled the current situation.”

As the stock market, spooked by the escalating housing mess, went on a roller-coaster ride last summer, Wall Street pressured the Federal Reserve for an interest rate cut to help calm credit fears. The Fed demurred. On Aug. 8, a day after the Fed decided against lowering rates, Mr. Rubin placed a phone call to Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, to compliment the decision, according to a person familiar with the call.

Although Mr. Rubin’s interactions with federal regulators have drawn scrutiny in the past, this person said that Mr. Rubin acted “on his own behalf and not on behalf of Citigroup.” This person said Mr. Rubin made the call because he believed a rate cut might encourage reckless behavior on Wall Street.

Among all of the time bombs lurking in Citigroup’s portfolio, a particularly risky type of mortgage investment that carried a feature known as a liquidity put has drawn attention. Analysts say losses from those products could ultimately cost the bank tens of billions of dollars, and Mr. Rubin drew attention in Fortune magazine for not knowing more about that exposure.

“Liquidity puts are a footnote to a $2.2 trillion balance sheet,” he responds. “No regulators saw it, to the best of my knowledge. No analysts saw it. No accountants saw it.”

Citigroup’s investors were unaware of them, too. The bank did not fully break out the liquidity puts as a matter of risk until November 2007.

Since then, Mr. Rubin has walked a fine line between helping stabilize the company and not getting pulled too deeply into its daily affairs. After Mr. Prince resigned in November, Mr. Rubin reluctantly agreed to serve as interim chairman but left that post five weeks later when Winfried F. W. Bischoff became the permanent chairman.

Even during that brief interregnum, his gold-plated Rolodex came in handy. When Citigroup turned to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority for $7.5 billion in fresh capital, it was Mr. Rubin who personally flew to Abu Dhabi over Thanksgiving weekend to cement the deal.

WHAT’S more, Mr. Rubin’s board-level executive committee has also started holding regular meetings for the first time since he joined in 1999. Every two weeks, the group convenes with the rest of the board for a briefing by the bank’s top executives. Mr. Rubin offers big-picture observations about topics like credit market conditions and what new regulations might mean for Citigroup. But nitty-gritty issues, like how to value assets, are mostly left to others.

Mr. Rubin also helped recruit the man now responsible for pulling Citigroup out of the financial muck — Vikram S. Pandit — and the two have formed a strong bond.

“We have a one-of-a-kind person to whom we all can rely on and seek advice,” says Mr. Pandit, who became chief executive of Citigroup in December. “That is a great comfort and a great attribute of this organization.”

Mr. Rubin says that he “committed to Vikram that I’d be active at Citi as he works through the problems.”

For its part, Citigroup’s board, Mr. Bischoff said, feels “very well served by Bob” and doesn’t hold him accountable for the bank’s woes. “The responsibility ultimately rests with management,” Mr. Bischoff said. “Perhaps if he was the ultimate decision maker, things might be different.”

Even as his critics and supporters debate the impact of the Citigroup debacle on Mr. Rubin’s reputation, he says he remains focused on the challenges at hand.

“I watched so many people get screwed up in Washington thinking about their legacy, and not on the implications of what they were doing,” he says, calm as ever. “I’ve seen a lot of ups and downs, a lot of turmoil.”

Between college and law school, Mr. Rubin briefly lived on the Left Bank in Paris, spending hours at cafes that were frequented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Like them, he says, he remains something of an existentialist.

“It’ll be what it will be, like everything in life.”

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#####EOF##### Jim Dwyer

Jim Dwyer

Jim Dwyer, a native New Yorker, has spent most of his professional life covering the city as a reporter, columnist and author. He joined the Times in May 2001 after stints at the Daily News, New York Newsday and several papers in northern New Jersey. His work for The Times has included coverage of 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2004 presidential campaign and law enforcement surveillance of political activities. He has written the About New York column since 2007. The winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for commentary and a co-recipient of the 1992 Pulitzer for breaking news, Mr. Dwyer is also the author or co-author of six books.

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#####EOF##### Arts - The New York Times

Arts

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    CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

    An Experimental Music Scene Grows in Gowanus

    The new state-of-the-art Public Records in Brooklyn is the latest addition to a budding group of clubs that encourage close listening and community building.

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    CreditDonation Jorn, Silkeborg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VISDA; via Museum Jorn

    New York Art Galleries: What to See Right Now

    Asger Jorn and company’s irreverent improvisations; Brett Wallace’s dystopian workplace; and Jackie Gendel’s portraits of women, all “to be titled.”

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    CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

    Stage Royalty Joined, and Separated, by Apartheid

    South African actors John Kani and Antony Sher reunite for a play that explores how attitudes have, and haven’t changed, in the 25 years since democracy.

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#####EOF##### Breaking News, World News & Multimedia - The New York Times

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When Sean Hannity of Fox News called the press corps “fake news” at a Trump rally, it was the culmination of the network’s shift to a post-Ailes MAGA messaging machine. Margaret Cheatham Williams/The New York Times
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#####EOF##### Opinion | Mark Zuckerberg’s Delusion of Consumer Consent - The New York Times

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Delusion of Consumer Consent

He said Facebook users want tailored ads. According to our research, that’s not true.

By Joseph Turow and Chris Jay Hoofnagle

Mr. Turow is a professor of communications. Mr. Hoofnagle is an adjunct professor of law.

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CreditCreditAndrew Harrer/Bloomberg

The internet’s business model is tailored advertising. Internet firms hoover up information about what you do and say on the web, in apps and even in physical locations. They then sell advertisers the ability to figure out whether you’re valuable enough for them to want to reach you, and if you are, how they should try to persuade you.

In a recent Wall Street Journal commentary, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook users want to see ads tailored to their interests. But the data show the opposite is true. With the help of major polling firms, we conducted two large national telephone surveys of Americans in 2012 and 2009. When we asked people whether they wanted websites they visit to show them commercial ads, news or political ads “tailored to your interests,” a substantial majority said no. Around half did say they wanted discounts tailored to their interests. But that too changed after we told them how companies gathered the information that enables tailoring, such as following you on a website. Bottom line: If Facebook’s users in the United States are similar to most Americans (and studies suggest they are), large majorities don’t want personalized ads — and when they learn how companies find out information about them, even greater percentages don’t want them.

To Mr. Zuckerberg, protecting ad personalization from privacy rules is key. His essay argues that regulatory intervention would take away a “free” goody from the public. Facebook makes virtually all its revenues from advertising, and it has created enormous amounts of data about the people who use Facebook and the larger internet. In his essay, Mr. Zuckerberg defends Facebook from a chorus of critics who rail against a business model that they argue uses and abuses people’s information under the guise of transparency, choice and control. Mr. Zuckerberg therefore has an interest in arguing that he and his colleagues well understand what his audience wants. “People consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant,” he writes. “That means we need to understand their interests.”

But consider how deeply the specifics of what we found contradict Mr. Zuckerberg’s case. In one of our surveys, we asked 1,503 Americans four different questions: whether or not they wanted “the websites you visit” to show them (1) tailored ads for products and services, (2) tailored discounts, (3) tailored news and (4) tailored political ads. If a respondent answered yes to any of the above questions, we went deeper, asking whether the tailoring to their interests would be acceptable if based on the user’s behavior on the website the user was visiting, on the user’s browsing on other websites and on offline activities, such as store shopping or magazine subscriptions.

Sixty-one percent of respondents said no, they did not want tailored ads for products and services, 56 percent said no to tailored news, 86 percent said no to tailored political ads, and 46 percent said no to tailored discounts. But when we added in the results of the second set of questions about tracking people on that firm’s website, other websites and offline, the percentage that in the end decided they didn’t want tailoring ranged from 89 percent to 93 percent with political ads, 68 percent to 84 percent for commercial ads, 53 percent to 77 percent for discounts, and 64 percent to 83 percent for news.

This resounding consumer rejection of surveillance-based ads and content actually makes sense in view of the surveys that we and others have carried out on the digital marketing environment. We find consistently that people are wary of marketers tracking them, don’t understand the complexities of data mining, and don’t like to be discriminated against based on information that companies have about them and others. They may therefore see personalization as a double-edge sword. Personalization can provide them with material they like, but it just as well could be used to shape their behavior or beliefs, or even cause them to lose out on discounts to more desirable consumers. Given that people have lives outside the internet and don’t have the time or ability to figure out its complexities, they may go with the flow of Facebook’s understanding of their views. But our studies suggest that their attitudes toward relevance are far more complex than Mr. Zuckerberg asserts, and very likely in the opposite direction.

Our work yielded another finding that ought to be taken seriously. When asked to choose what, if anything, should be a company’s single punishment beyond fines if it “uses a person’s information illegally,” 38 percent of Americans answered that the company should “fund efforts to help people protect privacy.” But over half of Americans adults were far tougher: 18 percent responded that the company should “be put out of business” and 35 percent said “executives who are responsible should face jail time.” (Three percent said the company shouldn’t be punished and 6 percent said it depends or didn’t know.)

Use of personal information is a serious issue to the American public. People consent because they have no choice. And delusional statements like Mr. Zuckerberg’s that they want to go with his plan should not go unchallenged.

Joseph Turow is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “The Aisles Have Eyes.” Chris Jay Hoofnagle is an adjunct professor at Berkeley Law School and the author of “Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy.”

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#####EOF##### A Future Where Everything Becomes a Computer Is as Creepy as You Feared - The New York Times

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A Future Where Everything Becomes a Computer Is as Creepy as You Feared

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More than 40 years ago, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft with a vision for putting a personal computer on every desk.

No one really believed them, so few tried to stop them. Then before anyone realized it, the deed was done: Just about everyone had a Windows machine, and governments were left scrambling to figure out how to put Microsoft’s monopoly back in the bottle.

This sort of thing happens again and again in the tech industry. Audacious founders set their sights on something hilariously out of reach — Mark Zuckerberg wants to connect everyone — and the very unlikeliness of their plans insulates them from scrutiny. By the time the rest of us catch up to their effects on society, it’s often too late to do much about them.

It is happening again now. In recent years, the tech industry’s largest powers set their sights on a new target for digital conquest. They promised wild conveniences and unimaginable benefits to our health and happiness. There’s just one catch, which often goes unstated: If their novelties take off without any intervention or supervision from the government, we could be inviting a nightmarish set of security and privacy vulnerabilities into the world. And guess what. No one is really doing much to stop it.

The industry’s new goal? Not a computer on every desk nor a connection between every person, but something grander: a computer inside everything, connecting everyone.

Cars, door locks, contact lenses, clothes, toasters, refrigerators, industrial robots, fish tanks, sex toys, light bulbs, toothbrushes, motorcycle helmets — these and other everyday objects are all on the menu for getting “smart.” Hundreds of small start-ups are taking part in this trend — known by the marketing catchphrase “the internet of things” — but like everything else in tech, the movement is led by giants, among them Amazon, Apple and Samsung.

For instance, Amazon last month showed off a microwave powered by Alexa, its voice assistant. Amazon will sell the microwave for $60, but it is also selling the chip that gives the device its smarts to other manufacturers, making Alexa connectivity a just-add-water proposition for a wide variety of home appliances, like fans and toasters and coffee makers. And this week, both Facebook and Google unveiled their own home “hub” devices that let you watch videos and perform other digital tricks by voice.

You might dismiss many of these innovations as pretty goofy and doomed to failure. But everything big in tech starts out looking silly, and statistics show the internet of things is growing quickly. It is wiser, then, to imagine the worst — that the digitization of just about everything is not just possible but likely, and that now is the time to be freaking out about the dangers.

“I’m not pessimistic generally, but it’s really hard not to be,” said Bruce Schneier, a security consultant who explores the threats posed by the internet of things in a new book, “Click Here to Kill Everybody.”

Mr. Schneier argues that the economic and technical incentives of the internet-of-things industry do not align with security and privacy for society generally. Putting a computer in everything turns the whole world into a computer security threat — and the hacks and bugs uncovered in just the last few weeks at Facebook and Google illustrate how difficult digital security is even for the biggest tech companies. In a roboticized world, hacks would not just affect your data but could endanger your property, your life and even national security.

Mr. Schneier says only government intervention can save us from such emerging calamities. He calls for reimagining the regulatory regime surrounding digital security in the same way the federal government altered its national security apparatus after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Among other ideas, he outlines the need for a new federal agency, the National Cyber Office, which he imagines researching, advising and coordinating a response to threats posed by an everything-internet.

“I can think of no industry in the past 100 years that has improved its safety and security without being compelled to do so by government,” he wrote. But he conceded that government intervention seems unlikely at best. “In our government-can’t-do-anything-ever society, I don’t see any reining in of the corporate trends,” he said.

Those trends are now obvious. It used to be difficult to add internet connectivity to home devices, but in the last few years the cost and complexity of doing so have plummeted. Today, off-the-shelf minicomputers like the Arduino can be used to turn just about any household object “smart.” Systems like the one Amazon is offering promise to accelerate the development of internet-of-things devices even further.

At a press event last month, an Amazon engineer showed how easily a maker of household fans could create a “smart” fan using Amazon’s chip, known as the Alexa Connect Kit. The kit, which Amazon is testing with some manufacturers, would simply be plugged into the fan’s control unit during assembly. The manufacturer also has to write a few lines of code — in the example of the fan, the Amazon engineer needed just a half-page of code.

And that’s it. The fan’s digital bits (including security and cloud storage) are all handled by Amazon. If you buy it from Amazon, the fan will automatically connect with your home network and start obeying commands issued to your Alexa. Just plug it in.

This system illustrates Mr. Schneier’s larger argument, which is that the cost of adding computers to objects will get so small that it will make sense for manufacturers to connect every type of device to the internet.

Sometimes, smarts will lead to conveniences — you can yell at your microwave to reheat your lunch from across the room. Sometimes it will lead to revenue opportunities — Amazon’s microwave will reorder popcorn for you when you’re running low. Sometimes smarts are used for surveillance and marketing, like the crop of smart TVs that track what you watch for serving up ads.

Even if the benefits are tiny, they create a certain market logic; at some point not long from now, devices that don’t connect to the internet will be rarer than ones that do.

The trouble, though, is that business models for these devices don’t often allow for the kind of continuing security maintenance that we are used to with more traditional computing devices. Apple has an incentive to keep writing security updates to keep your iPhone secure; it does so because iPhones sell for a lot of money, and Apple’s brand depends on keeping you safe from digital terrors.

But manufacturers of low-margin home appliances have little such expertise, and less incentive. That’s why the internet of things has so far been synonymous with terrible security — why the F.B.I. had to warn parents last year about the dangers of “smart toys,” and why Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, has identified smart devices as a growing threat to national security.

An Amazon representative told me that the company was building security into the core of its smart technologies. The Connect Kit, the company said, lets Amazon maintain the digital security of a smart device — and Amazon is very likely to be better at security than many manufacturers of household appliances. As part of its cloud business, the company also offers a service for companies to audit the security of their internet-of-things services.

The Internet of Things Consortium, an industry group that represents dozens of companies, did not respond to an inquiry.

Mr. Schneier is painting government intervention not as a panacea but as a speed bump, a way for us humans to catch up to the technological advances. Regulation and government oversight slow down innovation — that’s one reason techies don’t like it. But when uncertain global dangers are involved, taking a minute isn’t a terrible idea.

Connecting everything could bring vast benefits to society. But the menace could be just as vast. Why not go slowly into the uncertain future?

Email: farhad.manjoo@nytimes.com; Twitter: @fmanjoo.

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Your Toaster May Be Watching. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Equifax Says Cyberattack May Have Affected 143 Million in the U.S. - The New York Times

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Equifax Says Cyberattack May Have Affected 143 Million in the U.S.

Equifax, one of the three major consumer credit reporting agencies, said on Thursday that hackers had gained access to company data that potentially compromised sensitive information for 143 million American consumers, including Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers.

The attack on the company represents one of the largest risks to personally sensitive information in recent years, and is the third major cybersecurity threat for the agency since 2015.

Equifax, based in Atlanta, is a particularly tempting target for hackers. If identity thieves wanted to hit one place to grab all the data needed to do the most damage, they would go straight to one of the three major credit reporting agencies.

“This is about as bad as it gets,” said Pamela Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit research group. “If you have a credit report, chances are you may be in this breach. The chances are much better than 50 percent.”

Criminals gained access to certain files in the company’s system from mid-May to July by exploiting a weak point in website software, according to an investigation by Equifax and security consultants. The company said that it discovered the intrusion on July 29 and has since found no evidence of unauthorized activity on its main consumer or commercial credit reporting databases.

In addition to the other material, hackers were also able to retrieve names, birth dates and addresses. Credit card numbers for 209,000 consumers were stolen, while documents with personal information used in disputes for 182,000 people were also taken.

Other cyberattacks, such as the two breaches that Yahoo announced in 2016, have eclipsed the penetration at Equifax in sheer size, but the Equifax attack is worse in terms of severity. Thieves were able to siphon far more personal information — the keys that unlock consumers’ medical histories, bank accounts and employee accounts.

“On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of risk to consumers, this is a 10,” said Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst at Gartner.

An F.B.I. spokesperson said the agency was aware of the breach and was tracking the situation.

Last year, identity thieves successfully made off with critical W-2 tax and salary data from an Equifax website. And earlier this year, thieves again stole W-2 tax data from an Equifax subsidiary, TALX, which provides online payroll, tax and human resources services to some of the nation’s largest corporations.

Cybersecurity professionals criticized Equifax on Thursday for not improving its security practices after those previous thefts, and they noted that thieves were able to get the company’s crown jewels through a simple website vulnerability.

“Equifax should have multiple layers of controls” so if hackers manage to break in, they can at least be stopped before they do too much damage, Ms. Litan said.

Potentially adding to criticism of the company, three senior executives, including the company’s chief financial officer, John Gamble, sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in the days after the breach was discovered. The shares were not part of a sale planned in advance, Bloomberg reported.

The company handles data on more than 820 million consumers and more than 91 million businesses worldwide and manages a database with employee information from more than 7,100 employers, according to its website.

Equifax also houses much of the data that is supposed to be a backstop against security breaches. The agency offers a service that provides companies with the questions and answers needed for their account recovery, in the event customers lose access to their accounts.

“If that information is breached, you’ve lost that backstop,” said Patrick Harding, the chief technology officer at Ping Identity, a Denver-based identity management company.

Equifax said that, in addition to reporting the breach to law enforcement, it had hired a cybersecurity firm to conduct a review to determine the scale of the invasion. The investigation is expected to wrap up in the next few weeks.

“This is clearly a disappointing event for our company, and one that strikes at the heart of who we are and what we do,” Richard F. Smith, chairman and chief executive of Equifax, said in a statement. “Confronting cybersecurity risks is a daily fight.”

Using the data stolen from Equifax, identity thieves can impersonate people with lenders, creditors and service providers, who rely on personal identity information from Equifax to make financial decisions regarding potential customers.

Equifax has created a website, www.equifaxsecurity2017.com, to help consumers determine whether their data was at risk.

People can go to the Equifax website to see if their information has been compromised. The site encourages customers to offer their last name and the last six digits of their Social Security number. When they do, however, they do not necessarily get confirmation about whether they were affected. Instead, the site provides an enrollment date for its protection service, and it may not start for several days.

The company also suggests getting a free copy of your credit report from the three major credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. These are available at annualcreditreport.com. It also suggests contacting a law enforcement agency if you believe any stolen information has already been used in some way.

Equifax’s credit protection service, which is free for one year for consumers who enroll by Nov. 21, is available to everyone and not just the victims of the breach.

Equifax is offering consumers the ability to freeze their Equifax credit reports, said John Ulzheimer, a consumer credit expert who often does expert witness work for banks and credit unions and worked at Equifax in the 1990s. Thieves could have information stolen from Equifax and used it to open accounts with creditors that use Experian or TransUnion.

“It’s like locking one of three doors in your house and leaving the other two unlocked,” Mr. Ulzheimer said. “You’re hoping the thief stumbles on the locked door.” He recommended that all those affected immediately place a fraud alert on all three of their credit files, which anyone can do for free.

Equifax’s offer of one year of free protection falls short of what consumers really need, because their information can be bought and sold by hackers for years to come, Mr. Ulzheimer added.

Beyond compromising the personal data of millions of consumers, the breach also poses a potential national security threat. In recent years, Chinese nation-state hackers have breached insurers like Anthem and federal agencies, siphoning detailed personal and medical information. These hackers go wide in their assaults in an effort to build databases of Americans’ personal information, which can be used for blackmail or future attacks.

Governments regularly buy stolen personal information on the so-called Dark Web, security experts say. The black market sites where this information is sold are far more exclusive than black markets where stolen credit card data is sold. Interested buyers are even asked to submit to background checks before they are admitted.

“Cyberwar is in large part conducted through data mining and cyberintelligence,” Ms. Litan said. “This is also a Homeland Security risk as enemy nation states build databases of Americans that they then use to get to their targets, for example a network operator at a power grid, or a defense contractor at a missile defense company.”

Sen. Mark R. Warner, a Virginia Democrat who co-founded the Senate Cybersecurity Caucus, said he believed the severity of the Equifax breach raised serious questions about whether Congress needed to rethink data protection policies.

“It is no exaggeration to suggest that a breach such as this — exposing highly sensitive personal and financial information central for identity management and access to credit — represents a real threat to the economic security of Americans,” he said in a statement.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Equifax Attack Exposes Data Of 143 Million. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### At War: Notes From the Front Lines - At War Blog - The New York Times

Seven Marathons in Seven Days, Crossing Each Finish Line for Fellow Marines

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Capt. Calum Ramm at the Antarctica Logistics and Expedition base camp on Union Glacier. The tents in the back were the team’s lodging.Credit Callum Ramm

Calum Ramm, a captain in the Marine Corps, has run many marathons in his day, but last week he set out on a far bigger challenge: running seven marathons on seven continents in just seven days as part of the World Marathon Challenge. Starting off deep in Antarctica on Jan. 23, he went on to complete marathons in Chile, Miami, Madrid, Morocco and Dubai before the finale in Sydney, Australia, on Friday. Only 15 athletes took part; those who finished ran 183.4 miles through snow, mountains, tropical heat and city streets.

Captain Ramm, from Lansing, Mich., is running to raise money for a charity, the Semper Fi Fund. and is a member of the official Marine Corps running team. Here are some of his thoughts about his experience:

Running in Antarctica was actually a lot easier than I thought. It was a four-lap course, and if I closed my eyes it was almost as if I was running in Michigan during a long winter in my high school days. I only had a base layer and jacket on, plus the normal hat / gloves / balaclava, and still overheated at times. Because the sky was the same hue as the snow, it was difficult to see anything more than white — and beyond it, the outline of mountains. A thin slice of blue sky off the horizon was the only thing that kept me from losing all orientation.

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Captain Ramm finishing the marathon in Punta Arenas, Chile, with a time of 3:13:18. This was taken less than 24 hours after he had run the marathon in Antarctica, finishing with a time of 3:31:43.Credit Richard Donovan/World Marathon Challenge

Chile was way easier, but the wind was brutal. Almost had me moving backwards at some points. I went out really slow, but dropped some serious splits on the last eight miles. Felt really good upon finishing, almost better than Antarctica. The footing was obviously better so that helped.

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Combat Amputees, and Their Therapists, Find Roads to Happiness

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Adele Levine at the new Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., in May 2013.Credit Adele Levine

Last week I was at the wedding of an old co-worker. There was a big cast there, all past employees (physical and occupational therapists) from the amputee section of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Included in the mix was a former patient I recognized immediately, though I did not remember his injuries. That I remembered his face, but not the fact that he was missing both arms and a leg at the groin, caught me totally off guard.

Finding myself surprised by the extent of this young man’s injuries — injuries that were routine for so many years — well, a light flickered in my brain. And suddenly, I was back there in our old clinic, surrounded by young men on treatment tables. In my mind, their faces blurred softly and their injuries faded into the ever-present background of yellow hospital gowns, wheelchairs, and parallel bars.

At Walter Reed, where most of our patients were combat-injured active duty soldiers and marines — young men in their 20s with crew cuts — the therapists had gotten into the habit of identifying our patients by their injuries when discussing our caseload. Rob from Arkansas was a double AK (missing both legs above the knee) with orange running shoes. Charlie was a triple (missing three limbs) with a nonregulation beard that needed to come off STAT. Chris was an AK/BK (above knee and below knee amputee) who comes to PT in the morning and was really particular about time management (i.e., demanded to be seen at 0645 (6:45 a.m.) even though we didn’t start patient care until 0700.

Our patients did the same thing to each other. Referring to a soldier as a “hip” if he happened to missing a leg at the groin. Or jokingly, “paper cut” if a soldier was “only” missing one leg below the knee — all in spite of the fact that losing a limb is never a minor injury.

After several years in the amputee section, it was not unusual for my colleagues and me to request a favorite type of injury when we were asked to pick up a new patient. Darcy loved the challenge of working with double AK’s (missing legs above the knee). A devastating injury, but Darcy really had a flair for it. She scoffed off any compliments by saying it was only because they “couldn’t cheat” the way someone with a less severe amputation on the other side might.

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Focusing on Leadership as Marine Corps Mandate to Integrate Women in Combat Units Nears

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Sergeant Danielle Beck, right, checks the mounting of a weapons system during the Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force in Twentynine Palms, CA.Credit Courtesy Teresa Fazio

Fourteen years ago, when I was a midshipman at Marine Corps Officer Candidates School, our female sergeant instructor lined us up at attention. “If you’re a woman in the Marine Corps,” she said, “you’re either a bitch, a dyke, or a ho.” Shocking? Perhaps. But with a purpose: she was trying to prepare us to interact with men who wouldn’t always be supportive of our presence. So this fall, before Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter announced that women would be allowed into all military occupations, I looked to the Marine Corps’ yearlong experiment to integrate women into ground combat jobs to see if attitudes had changed.

The early indications were not good. A four-page, unsigned summary of the experiment made public last summer bluntly concluded that all-male units outperformed integrated units in combat tasks, particularly hiking while carrying heavy loads and manning certain heavier weapons. But those four pages did not mention statistics about unit cohesion. When I interviewed several female Marines who participated in the experiment, I found an interesting pattern. The quality of leadership at the squad, platoon and company level was a key factor that directly affected the successful integration of women into a cohesive unit.

Sgt. Danielle Beck paused her career as a comptroller to join the experiment’s Weapons Company. She trained in anti-armor missiles, the heaviest of which weighed about sixty pounds. Of the six women that started in her platoon, she and two others finished; the other three were injured. “We had great leadership at Weapons Company,” Sergeant Beck said. The attitude was, ‘we’re here for a mission, we’re here for a task, and we’re gonna get this done.’ ”

Crucial to maintaining this attitude, she said, was the company leadership, headed by Capt. Mark Lenzi. “We interacted on a daily basis. We hiked, trained, P.T.’d — they were with us,” Sergeant Beck said. Leadership by example ingrained expectations of high performance into the troops.
Another advantage was that Weapons Company comprised mostly corporals and sergeants — NCOs in their early-to-mid-twenties, who were more mature than typical junior enlisted just out of high school. The men had been doing their jobs for years — tasks the women in the company had been trained for just months prior.

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Letters From the Pacific, From Pearl Harbor to Okinawa

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Harold Grove Moss in Maui, Hawaii, 1943.Credit Courtesy of Lori Neumann / mossletters.com

On December 2, 1941, an Army private named Harold Grove Moss was a week away from finishing his Morse Code training to become a radio operator. He was stationed at Camp Roberts in California. “Something seemingly a little unusual happened yesterday and that was all the Japanese boys were taken out of our battery,” he wrote that day in a letter to his parents in Minatare, Neb. But he didn’t dwell on it; he also mentioned that a homemade cake they sent “wasn’t broken a bit,” and ended with a modest Christmas list, including “a camera” and a “pair of brown civilian shoes (no two tone).” Five days later, as news of the attack on Pearl Harbor was filtering through the ranks, he wrote again.

“Dear folks,” he began,

“…Have just heard a few minutes ago that Japan has really declared war now and that we will retaliate immediately…All that goes with this war fervor is taking place all along the coast with patrols, listening posts, and ship movement orders being given…I hope, but I know it is a vain hope, that you will not worry unnecessarily and not be overly anxious about me.  Of course I will write often to tell you all I can, not knowing what will be done with the mail.”

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Harold Moss in 1943, having been promoted to staff sergeant.Credit Courtesy of Lori Neumann / mossletters.com

Much of his mail did reach its destination, and is now available to many more readers thanks to his daughter, Lori Neumann, who has transcribed and posted this and 340 more of his letters from the Pacific at mossletters.com. Alongside the letters are dozens of photos and other bits of wartime ephemera which made it back to the states — some in the letters, and some with Mr. Moss himself. He began his tour as a University of Nebraska sophomore in September 1941 and saw action in the Philippines and in Okinawa as a member of the 225th Field Artillery Battalion; his service ended Nov. 1, 1945, a few months after the Japanese surrendered.

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How We Judge Those Who Served, or Didn’t, in Vietnam

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David Nelson in Marine Corps officer candidates' school in Quantico, Va., in August 1966.Credit U.S. Marine Corps
Voices

The first Democratic presidential debate once again raised the issue of military service during the Vietnam War. Senator Bernie Sanders was asked how he could be commander-in-chief, given that he applied for conscientious objector status during that war. (Though his application was rejected he was not drafted and did not serve.)

But while Mr. Sanders’s college-age pacifism — his office says he is not a pacifist now — has raised questions, he is not the only candidate to avoid Vietnam: Donald Trump and a few other candidates also were old enough to serve in that war but did not, for various reasons. The one candidate who did serve in Vietnam, former Senator Jim Webb, a decorated former Marine, dropped out of the Democratic nominating race. And the only remaining veteran in the pack, Senator Lindsey Graham, who recently retired from the Air Force Reserve, was 19 when the last American troops left Vietnam.

Vietnam has always been a sort of litmus test for some voters who view a lack of military service in that war as a cause for dismay and even disdain. But should the candidates be judged so harshly?

Most of us who were old enough to have been subject to the military draft during Vietnam view questions related to the war and our draft status through our personal reactions to that war. I signed up for a Marine Corps officer training program on Oct. 21, 1965, and my thoughts after the Democratic debate have focused on my situation around that time period: What was I thinking?

As a 20-year-old growing up in Lubbock, Tex., I had few philosophical thoughts about the war. A senior in high school at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, I was keenly aware of the fear that communism might spread throughout the world, and I readily bought into the so-called domino theory that if South Vietnam fell to communist forces, other countries in the region would be next.

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Questions and Answers about Veteran Suicides

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Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Since coming back from Afghanistan in 2008, the hard-hit Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment has struggled to adjust. The battalion, known as the 2/7, lost 20 men in war. In the years since, it has lost 13 more to suicide. The battalion now has a suicide rate 14 times that for all Americans.

The New York Times asked Dr. Charles Engel, of the RAND Corporation, and two Marines who served with the battalion in Afghanistan, Arthur Karell and Keith Branch, to answer readers’ questions about the devastating effects of combat and the high suicide rate among veterans. The conversation took place on Facebook in October, moderated by Dave Philipps, a reporter for The Times who covers veterans’ affairs. Here are some of the questions and answers, which have been condensed and edited.

Q. Why were the mental health concerns of the battalion not identified following deployment? What can be done to better identify service members who are struggling?

Arthur Karell: The process for identifying mental health concerns consisted of one post-deployment health assessment (a questionnaire), along with two weeks of downtime leave after getting back to the States. Then the battalion immediately enters a training cycle for the next deployment. The overwhelming emphasis is on constant tactical training — longer-term considerations got crowded out. I have heard that this is now starting to change, and I hope that is actually the case. Allowing Marines and other service members more time to spend together as a cohesive unit after a combat deployment would go a long way to better identifying service members who are struggling. Finally, that there is zero information-sharing between the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration makes it impossible for health providers or volunteer organizations to have access to information that could provide indications of possible problems. Privacy is an issue, but service members should at least have the option to allow their D.O.D. service records to inform V.A. health providers.

Keith Branch: Ideally, if someone scored as “high risk” on the post-deployment assessment, he or she would be referred to on-base mental health services. From my memory, there were only a handful of service members who utilized these services — I was one of them. However, my stint in therapy lasted less than a month. First, there is an extremely prevalent negative stigma associated with seeking mental health services, especially in the combat arms occupations where weakness is not tolerated. I hope things have changed since 2009. Second, the mental health services on base had long waiting periods and the solution was to prescribe medication. I know more than a few Marines who became addicts while seeking mental health services. From my experience, many Marines do not show signs of mental health problems until they separate from the service. I think being surrounded by the people who served in combat with you provides a sense of security. However, that security is lost when service members separate and return home.

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The Specter of Addiction and Suicide Among Veterans

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Brandon Caro in New York City in August.Credit Boyan Penkov

As suicide attempts go, mine was of the halfhearted variety. In fact, some might even argue that it was no attempt at all. The police arrived at my Austin home following a fight I’d had in the driveway with my friend Bill, who’s also a veteran. Bill had been called over to the house by my then girlfriend because she was worried about the way I was acting.

I was wired on a cocktail of Adderall and Trazodone, and had a few drinks the night before as well. When the police arrived the following morning, a man and a woman, I asked the woman if her pistol was loaded.

“Of course it is. Why would you ask a thing like that?”

“Because I want you to shoot me in the head.”

To this day, I’m not sure why I said that. In retrospect I think it was less about wanting to die and more about expressing to another human being that I was in pain. But they were police officers, and a solicitation for suicide-by-cop, however unconvincing, was something they took very seriously.

“Right,” the male officer interjected. “We’re gonna have to bring you to the hospital.”

A minor struggle ensued outside, to the entertainment of my neighbors who observed the scene from a comfortable distance. I learned later from Bill and my now ex-girlfriend that the police entered my home and grabbed all the pharmacy bottles they could find (which numbered in the teens) and brought them to the hospital so the emergency room staff would know what I was on. They even stuck a catheter up my urethra.

They held me in observation for a day and a half, until I could get a friend to pick me up and drive me to the Austin Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic to speak to a mental health specialist. She wanted me to come in every week through the summer, but I told her I had plans to study abroad in France, so she made me promise to check back in when I returned or she would have me brought in. I came for a follow-up at the end of the summer, just because I didn’t want the police to come back to my house. I had no interest in engaging with the V.A. mental health specialists. They were way too quick to prescribe medication, and drugs were something I was trying to get away from.

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The Hard Path From Afghanistan to the Classroom

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Staff Sgt. Ryan Blum, left, and Specialist Michael Gannon in Kunduz Province, Afghanistan, in 2010.Credit Zachary Bunch
Commentary: A Soldier Writes

A month before I started my freshman year of high school, my father was killed in a cycling accident. Overnight my mother became a single parent and our sole breadwinner. She was forced to work twelve-hour days to maintain our standard of living and consequently I was often alone in an empty house.

Like most teenagers, I rebelled. With the loss of my father came a profound loss of discipline in my life. Combined with the sudden absence of my mother who was now compelled to work long hours, the tragedy had an important tertiary effect: I stopped attending classes. Eventually, to the distress of my mother, I left high school, opting to take the G.E.D. instead. College was the last thing on my mind, because college was for savvy, affluent students who studied for SATs and graduated on a normal schedule. It wasn’t for people like me.

At 17, I would have been the ideal candidate for an ‘absentee father’ case study: misguided anger, unabashed recklessness, unclear identity. I sought challenges but had no purpose. Luckily (or unluckily) for me there was a war.

I was an Army recruiter’s dream. With my mother’s anxious signature, I was in.

Throughout most of my seven years in the military I gave little thought to the outside world. When provided the discipline, direction, and the brutish encouragement of male authority figures, I began to excel, rapidly advancing through the ranks. I was given ever-greater responsibility — making sergeant in two years. After my first three-year contract expired I enthusiastically re-enlisted for another four.

I had found my identity. I was a soldier.

Five years later everything changed during a deployment to Afghanistan in 2010.

One of our missions was to facilitate the opening of schools in Kunduz Province. That April, in an effort to intimidate girls from attending, the Taliban attacked the schools with poison gas. It didn’t work. The girls continued to walk to class despite the threat.

As a teenager, I had taken for granted the opportunity to have an education not because an armed insurgency prevented me, but because of my own ambivalence. In Afghanistan, a country plagued with incessant violence, the decision to go to school was often one of life or death. For me, it was a luxury I had wasted. And I regretted it.

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The Women of the Army Rangers’ Cultural Support Teams

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Lt. Ashley White in marksmanship training during Cultural Support Team training for deployment.Credit U.S.Army photo by SSG. Russell Lee Klika

Two women have now earned the Army’s elite Ranger designation. A third is in the final phase of Ranger School, the humidity-soaked “swamp phase” that ends later this month.

In the wake of this history making, Ranger School is now officially opened to women. And now Navy leaders say they are on track to open their arduous basic underwater demolition/SEAL training course to “anybody who can meet the gender non-specific standards” early next year.

Yet in this case the schoolhouse lags behind the battlefield. Women have served, taken fire and sacrificed their lives alongside the Army Rangers of the 75th Ranger Regiment for years.

I had no idea of this fact when, in 2012, a Marine told me about First Lt. Ashley White and her band of teammates who had been recruited for Ranger and SEAL combat missions a year earlier. They were part of what would come to be called cultural support teams, or C.S.T.s, a benign name for a groundbreaking concept.

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Ms. White at Kent State ROTC.Credit Courtesy

“What about the combat ban?” I asked, full of disbelief since I had not heard about this story despite having reported from Afghanistan for years.

Her response was the equivalent of my mother-in-law’s frequently issued “bless her heart,” a verbal pat on the head offered to those clueless souls  lacking in awareness of just how much they do not know.

“Just check it out; you’ll see,” she said.

I did. And with each interview I finished, I realized that I had stumbled across a community of women recruited to “become part of history” and to join combat operations back in 2011, first by the United States Special Operations Command and then by the Army Special Operations Command. All while the combat ban remained very much in place. These soldiers and service members (not all were Army) could be there, legally, despite the ban on women in ground combat because they were “attached” to special operations teams, just not “assigned” to them.

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The Cost of Lower Standards for Women in Marine Recruitment

The recent success of two female officers, both West Point graduates, in passing the Army’s grueling Ranger School has bolstered arguments for the full integration of women into the military’s front-line combat units. In becoming the first women to receive the coveted Ranger tab, the two officers proved that women can handle not just the physical challenges but also the psychological and leadership tests posed by the nine-week course.

Their graduation could not have come at a more important moment: In September, the heads of each armed services branch must tell Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter which positions and units they believe they can integrate and provide evidence for why any other position should remain closed.

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The author at Al-Taqqaddam Air Field, Iraq, in 2007.Credit Kyleanne Hunter

As that deadline looms, the Marine Corps is dealing with its own gender-related controversy. In June, Lt. Col. Kate Germano was removed from her position as commander of the Fourth Battalion at Parris Island, the Marines’ all-female boot camp. During her time as commander, Colonel Germano asserted that the Marines’ setting lower standards for women than men led to an underlying sexism in the ranks, one that systematically kept women from reaching their full potential.

It is noteworthy that most of the reports and commentary about Colonel Germano’s case have been written by men. Some pieces have been sympathetic to her situation, including one by Elliot Ackerman, a former Marine Corps officer, who used her case to give an honest and objective look at the systemic problems acting as barriers for women in the Marines. He argued that an institutionalized “hyper-masculinity” is a greater barrier than physical standards to the full integration of women into all military positions. It is a point that needs deeper discussion.

To add breadth and depth to this conversation, and to take it beyond Colonel Germano’s case, I believe it is time to speak out about my experiences. The more women who are willing to speak about the way in which the ingrained hyper-masculinity hinders progress toward integrated forces, the closer we will come to an honest conversation about the true hurdles to gender integration.

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Before ISIS, a Resonant Image of a Captured Flag in Iraq

Commentary: A Soldier Writes

Wars often produce iconic images that capture the naked truths of the struggle. Five Marines raise the American flag at Iwo Jima. A South Vietnamese general calmly fires a pistol into the head of a suspected Vietcong militant during the Tet offensive. A Huey evacuates Americans from a roof in Saigon in the spring of 1975.

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Lt. Col. Rod Coffey and the insurgent flag his unit captured in Diyala Province, Iraq, in 2008. The same banner would eventually be used by the Islamic State.Credit

One image from our experience in the United States Army during the Iraq war stands out. It is a photograph of our squadron commander, then Lt. Col. Rod Coffey, holding a captured flag. The flag is now the widely known black banner of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL. The photograph was taken by one of Colonel Coffey’s soldiers in March 2008 after American forces completely defeated insurgents in a portion of Diyala Province. Colonel Coffey stands with the flag in his right hand, his trademark cigar dangling in his left and the look of a man resolved to defeat militants whose barbarism today is ever so disturbingly documented by the media.

The flag is not unique to the Islamic State. Variations of the black banner adorned with the declaration of faith known as the shahada are used by other Islamic extremists. However, there is little doubt in our minds that the enemy our unit fought and defeated that winter would eventually become part of the Islamic State. Our unit found the flag near a mass grave site and an insurgent training camp.

Our unit — Third Squadron, Second Stryker Cavalry Regiment — then spent several days assisting Iraqi families in properly burying their dead. This was one of the many actions Colonel Coffey and our unit embraced to build trust with the Iraqis who had previously lived under the tyranny of the militant Islamists. Once sufficiently powerful American forces were in place to allow the people of Iraq to defy the extremists, Colonel Coffey worked closely with the senior sheikhs and political leaders to maintain the peace. He often told his men that the greatest weapon they wielded in the fight was decency.

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Reactions to Article About Gender Integration in the Marine Corps

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Lt. Col. Kate Germano, who took command of the Marine Corps’ all-women boot camp, was fired on June 30. The Corps said her Marines had been mistreated; she said her ability to command had been undermined.Credit Department of Defense

Earlier this week, The Times asked readers what they thought of Lt. Col. Kate Germano’s article arguing parity for men and women who enlist in the Marines Corps, and what could be done to improve gender integration. Colonel Germano, who served at the all-women boot camp in Parris Island in South Carolina, wrote that women face “lower expectations for accountability” and that “high standards should be demanded of all recruits and Marines.”

About 350 people responded, most of them in favor of equal standards and expectations of training for Marines, but others believed that women cannot meet the physical demands required of a Marine when placed in conflict. Here are selections from the comments, which have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Continue to pave the way for women

I graduated from Parris Island in 1976 and was one of the first female Marines allowed into the Avionics MOS. Though I was only one of two females in the entire squadron, I not only pulled my weight, but felt I made great strides for the female Marines to come behind me. I’m glad to see that nearly 40 years later, someone else is carrying that banner!
—Sarge56, Texas

Lowering expectations lowers performance

I am a 1986 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and have trained with women throughout my military career. They took the same classes and tests, and were expected to score as well or better than us, their male counterparts. There were a a few rare exceptions to the absolute meritocracy, all involving the upper body strength in specific physical strength tests. No bias, just a simple fact. I was privileged to study with and train alongside women who were every bit as capable and had the scores to prove it. I concur with Lt. Col Germano, lowering expectations lowers performance.
—Nelson, SLC, Utah

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Lt. Col. Kate Germano on the Marines and Women

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Female Marine recruits on the rifle range during boot camp at the Recruit Training Depot at Parris Island, S.C.Credit Scott Olson/Getty Images

For decades the Marine Corps has tolerated, even encouraged, lower performance from the young women who enlist in its ranks, an insidious gender bias that begins with the way women are treated immediately after they sign up and continues through their training at boot camp. The results are predictable – female Marines risk being less confident and less fully accepted than their male counterparts, because the Corps has failed them from the outset.

That is the position of Lt. Col. Kate Germano, an active-duty Marine officer who commanded both a Marine recruiting station in San Diego and a segregated all-female training battalion at Parris Island, the Corps’ boot camp in South Carolina. Colonel Germano presented this argument in a draft article, “When Did It Become an Insult to Train Like a Girl?” that she wrote early this year and in which she argued for tougher standards and higher expectations, or, in her words, a movement toward “radical change.”

The article, which does not address full integration into combat roles but details institutional patterns that Colonel Germano suggests ensure female Marines will not be fully respected by their male peers, had been slated for publication in September in the monthly Marine Corps Gazette, a private publication that serves as the Corps’ de facto professional journal. Then matters grew complicated.

Colonel Germano was relieved of command at Parris Island in June under circumstances that remain contentious, setting off a controversy about whether she was being punished for what the Corps calls an abusive leadership style, or for forcefully expressing her views about the how the Corps trains and integrates women into its male-dominated ranks.

Soon after she was relieved, the editor of the Gazette, John Keenan, who is also a former Marine colonel, dropped Colonel Germano’s article from the journal’s publication lineup. Her arguments taking the Corps to task for what she depicted as a record of double standards and complacency stood not to reach Marines’ eyes, including such passages as this:

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A Jump to Honor a Fallen Marine

Voices

We step off the C-130 ramp from 13,000 feet above the Florida Keys and into a radiant, cool blue sky, cloudless yet hazy on the horizon. Arms interlocked, Dan, Paul and I skydive in a three-man formation while a fourth chases us with his helmet-cam. There is nothing inherently unique about the act of falling at 149 miles per hour, not after you’ve done it enough. But this jump has a sacramental feel even at terminal velocity, and I know it’s due to the name of the drop zone beneath us.

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Matthew Komatsu, holding the flag on the right, after parachuting onto Loggerhead Island in May with fellow pararescuemen to honor Lt. Col. Christopher K. Raible of the Marines.Credit Jesse Stoda

I’m not sure when the military started naming parachute drop zones for the fallen. But among Air Force pararescuemen and combat rescue officers like Dan, Paul and me, it’s standard practice to name drop zones for fallen brothers. Cunningham Drop Zone: named for Jason Cunningham, a pararescueman, or PJ, who died on Roberts Ridge during Operation Anaconda in 2002. Maltz Drop Zone: named for a PJ killed in a 2003 Afghanistan helicopter crash. Plite. Gentz, the first combat rescue officer, or CRO, to die in Afghanistan. Flores. The list goes on.

Dan emailed me a few months back and said it was time to do the same. Not for a PJ or CRO, but a Marine we had carried in our arms: Lt. Col. Christopher K. Raible. The commander of a deployed squadron of Harriers, Colonel Raible died defending his men from 15 heavily armed insurgents who slipped inside the perimeter of Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, on Sept. 14, 2012. Dan, Paul, and I were all there that night – but at the end of the night, it was Dan who escorted Colonel Raible’s flag-covered remains from the Harrier Squadron to the hospital. Dan’s goodbye salute was the first of many to come during the colonel’s long journey home.

At 6,000 feet, the three of us break apart and track across the sky away from one another before deploying our parachutes. It’s not until my chute is open, and I’m suspended a half-mile above the blue-green waters of Dry Tortugas National Park that I can actually appreciate the view. To the east five kilometers is Fort Jefferson – a Civil War era fortress whose dark battlements took 30 years to build. Beneath me, Loggerhead Island looks like an elongated skateboard. A narrow beach rings the 1.5 mile perimeter of the island, holding back fields of green that consist mainly of prickly pear cactus.

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After Divorce, Losing Veterans’ Support Along With a Spouse

My wedding day was the first best day of my life. I could not have ordered a more perfect day if I had had a menu of choices in front of me. The marriage to my best friend was what I was really looking forward to. I wanted to settle down and start a family and that’s what we did. Our ideal world was lost on Sept. 6th, 2003. My husband, a member of the National Guard, was activated two days before our second son was born. Two weeks later he went to Iraq on what ended up being almost a year-and-a-half journey where he fought for his country and I fought to maintain our home.

For years after his deployment, I watched him struggle. I scratched and clawed to get him resources that were difficult to coordinate. I begged for tests; I fought to be the voice he did not have; I fought to be heard. He would tell his health-care providers one thing, but I would witness another. They experimented with a string of antipsychotic drugs, leaving me to deal with the potential dangerous side effects without any heads up. I put up with way more than I should have, but I held tight to our “for better or worse” vows and the unbending belief that if the tables were turned he would do the same for me. He would take care of me, right? After years of working through the system, we finally got the diagnoses of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on top of post-traumatic stress disorder. His care team fought hard to make sure his needs were met. We even started a nonprofit geared toward helping veterans and their families.

As time went by, two more babies came. My husband had moments of happiness, but generally was deep in depression, struggling with severe migraines and issues with TBI. Suffice it to say that certain lines were crossed, and I felt I could no longer remain married to him. I asked him to leave and, on Friday, our divorce became final. He let me go without hesitation. For him, there was apparently no reason to fight to keep me. I don’t want to come across as a bitter ex-wife. But I am angry that our happy life, our loving relationship was destroyed in combat.

Read more...

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#####EOF##### Obituaries - The New York Times

Obituaries

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Overlooked

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    Overlooked No More: Julia Morgan, Pioneering Female Architect

    Morgan, who was the first woman to earn an architect’s license in California, was a prolific designer of hundreds of buildings, namely the Hearst Castle at San Simeon.

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#####EOF##### Philippine Supreme Court Orders Release of Documents in Duterte’s Drug War - The New York Times

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Philippine Supreme Court Orders Release of Documents in Duterte’s Drug War

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Relatives of victims of drug-related killings at a church in Quezon City, the Philippines, last month.CreditCreditFrancis R Malasig/EPA, via Shutterstock

MANILA — The Philippines’ highest court ordered the government on Tuesday to release documents relating to thousands of deaths linked to President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war.

Rights groups quickly welcomed the Supreme Court ruling, saying it would give closure to many families of the more than 20,000 people they estimate have been killed in the crackdown that Mr. Duterte has justified as necessary to end the drug trade.

A court spokesman said the solicitor general had been ordered to submit police and other reports on the killings to the Supreme Court within 60 days and to copy the petitioners.

The solicitor general, Jose Calida, had argued that sharing the documents with third parties could jeopardize national security. The court had previously rejected the same argument after the petition was filed last February, when Mr. Calida sought to avoid submitting the documents at all.

The petitioners were the Center for International Law (Centerlaw), a rights advocacy group, and the Free Legal Assistance Group, which represents low-income clients.

The court has yet to rule on a separate petition by the Free Legal Assistance Group asking it to declare the police crackdown unconstitutional. The group says the police have been permitted to kill people suspected of selling drugs rather than arresting them.

The government says 5,000 deaths have occurred during police operations. But there are thousands more cases that are classified as “deaths under investigation,” including many that officials say were killings by pro-government vigilantes.

The majority of those killed were residents of poor communities or politicians whom Mr. Duterte had personally tagged as drug lords. The president’s critics have accused him of using the drug war to eliminate rivals.

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A funeral parlor worker transporting the body of a victim fatally shot by unidentified men in Pasay, south of Manila, last month.CreditFrancis R Malasig/EPA, via Shutterstock

Although three police officers were found guilty last year of the murder of a teenager mistaken for a drug dealer, rights groups say the killing spree has continued.

Romel Bagares, a lawyer helping Centerlaw in the case, called the Supreme Court decision a “big step towards establishing accountability” for drug war deaths.

In an interview, Mr. Bagares said the police reports should show whether proper procedures were followed. According to the operations manual used by the police, he said, the death of a suspect during an operation requires the filing of at least 30 documents, including a report to the state prosecutor seeking to establish that the suspect died while resisting officers.

“There ought to be 5,000-plus inquest reports there,” Mr. Bagares said, adding that for every report, the “forensics aspect should match the procedures for their use of force.”

The Supreme Court also ordered state attorneys to submit records for all “buy-bust operations” conducted in the San Andres Bukid district of Manila, the Philippine capital, where many of the killings have taken place. In 2017, Centerlaw filed a petition with the Supreme Court to issue a writ of amparo protecting residents of the district from the drug war.

Mr. Duterte already faces two murder complaints at the International Criminal Court, a situation that led his government to officially withdraw from the court last month.

The first complaint was filed in April 2017 by two men who said they had worked in Mr. Duterte’s death squad after he became mayor of the southern city of Davao in the late 1980s. The second was filed last August by relatives of eight people killed by police officers in the drug war.

Neri Colmenares, a rights lawyer who helped bring the second case to the international court, said the police had no choice but to comply with the Philippine court ruling, even if it angered Mr. Duterte.

In an interview, Mr. Colmenares demanded that the government follow the court order and provide copies of the police reports to lawyers representing the families of victims.

“This will help us see the true situation of human rights in the country in the time of Duterte’s drug war,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Justices Order Files Released Over Killings In Philippines. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Postal Service to Consolidate 48 Centers This Summer - The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The United States Postal Service announced Thursday that it would begin consolidating 48 mail processing centers beginning in July, the first phase of a cost-cutting plan that is intended to save the agency nearly $1.2 billion a year as it tries to adjust to declining mail volume.

The agency said it would consolidate an additional 92 processing centers in February, and 89 more in early 2014.

In all, the Postal Service said it would close 229 processing centers — about half of the total — and it expects to save about $2.1 billion a year after the plan is fully carried out in 2014. About 5,000 workers will be immediately affected by the consolidations, the agency said, though it was unclear if they would be reassigned or given incentives to retire. About 13,000 employees will be affected once the first phase is completed by February. A total of 28,000 positions will be eliminated by 2014.

The service’s latest plan to reduce costs comes as the agency continues to endure financial losses. In the first two quarters of the 2012 fiscal year, which ended March 31, the agency lost more than $6 billion.

A decline in first-class mail and the development of automated equipment have left the mail processing network larger than needed, and revenue has not kept up with the cost of maintaining the system, the agency said.

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“We simply do not have the mail volumes to justify the size and capacity of our current mail processing network,” said Patrick R. Donahoe, the postmaster general. “To return to long-term profitability and financial stability while keeping mail affordable, we must match our network to the anticipated workload.”

Nearly all the consolidations this year will occur in July and August, and they will resume early next year. No consolidations will occur from September through December because of the election and holiday mailing seasons, the agency said.

The Postal Service also announced that it would soon issue a new regulation on changes to overnight delivery.

In the 2011 fiscal year, which ended in September, the Postal Service had a mail processing network that included 461 facilities, 154,325 full-time employees and about 8,000 pieces of mail processing equipment. But mail volume has dropped precipitously over the last few years, to 168 billion pieces in 2011 from a high of 213 billion in 2006.

The agency is considering other cost-cutting initiatives, including moving to a five-day delivery schedule from six days and reducing compensation and benefits, with the aim of saving a total of $22.5 billion by 2016.

The agency says it wants to reduce its total processing, delivery and customer service work force of 574,000 full-time employees by about 150,000, and it hopes to do so by offering retirement incentives, rather than by conducting layoffs.

Last week, the service announced that it would reduce the hours at thousands of post offices rather than closing them. The measure is expected to save the agency about $500 million a year.

But Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware and a sponsor of a postal reform bill, said the closings and reduction in hours did not go far enough.

“Given these dire circumstances, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the postmaster general is moving forward to reduce costs with the limited tools at his disposal,” Mr. Carper said in a statement, “but the reality is that efforts of this scale are not enough to fundamentally fix the Postal Service’s financial problems.”

A coalition of mailing industry groups endorsed the Postal Service’s plan to shrink its mailing network.

“If the Postal Service is to be saved, then it must be streamlined, and this is a good first step,” said Art Sackler, coordinator of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, a group that includes FedEx and United Parcel Service.

The American Postal Workers Union disagreed. “It’s a terrible plan that’s not going to save much money and drive customers away,” said Sally Davidow, a spokeswoman for the union.

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#####EOF##### In an Age of Cybercrime, Low-Tech Thieves Target Mailboxes - The New York Times

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In an Age of Cybercrime, Low-Tech Thieves Target Mailboxes

The streets of Upper Manhattan were quiet, but a police officer saw two men standing in front of a blue mailbox at Broadway and Academy Street.

It was around 1:30 a.m., Jan. 17.

One of the men was holding a plastic bottle, which was tied to a string. While his partner stood lookout, the other man lowered the bottle into the mailbox, as if he were feeding a line off a pier, played the string a bit, then pulled it out.

Four pieces of mail were stuck to the bottle.

When the police officer stepped forward, the two men took off, leaving behind the plastic bottle. They were quickly caught. The mail was stuck on the bottle with glue.

“Such devices are commonly used to obtain mail from inside of mailboxes,” Officer Vito Guagenti said in a criminal complaint.

This may be the age of cybercrime, but in some New York neighborhoods crooks are on a spree of fishing old-fashioned snail mail out of street corner mailboxes, using decidedly low-tech tools like plastic bottles, glue and string.

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A message left on a mailbox on Bennett Avenue in Manhattan last month.CreditNikita Stewart/The New York Times

Or, as in another case in Upper Manhattan, a glue trap like those typically used to catch mice.

Some thieves wash the ink off the checks they snare and change the payees’ names. Others make trouble by using the account information.

Over the last year or so, the police and postal inspectors made about 150 arrests in the Bronx on charges of mail fishing, according to Donna Harris, a spokeswoman in New York for the United States Postal Inspection Service.

“We’ve been keeping this low profile,” she said. After realizing that “we weren’t going to arrest our way out of the problem,” Ms. Harris said, the postal authorities started changing the Bronx street mailboxes to make them harder to pilfer.

Like fishing fleets that go where the schools are running, the mail thieves seemed to have pulled anchor in the Bronx and sailed to northern Manhattan. Since October, 14 arrests have been made there, Ms. Harris said.

The crime wave had little chance of staying low profile, thanks to social media and reporting by the news website DNAinfo. Residents have taped warnings on the boxes after finding coatings of glue, or double-side tape.

Laurie Piette was walking her dog one morning in November in the Inwood neighborhood and spotted an envelope addressed to Con Edison that was stuck to a mouse glue trap. The envelope had been torn open, but the return address was legible. She posted an inquiry on Facebook.

Eventually, word got to the sender, Helen M. Churko, who had mailed her Con Edison bill and check a few days earlier.

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A mouse glue trap found in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan had a Con Edison envelope stuck to it.CreditLaurie Piette

A picture of the torn envelope stuck to the mouse glue trap was posted online.

“It was a great photograph,” Ms. Churko said, but shocking. “Literally the minute I stopped getting hysterical, I called my bank and told them what was going on.”

With electronic payment available for many bills, you might think that the pickings would be slim for mailbox thieves. But particularly in parts of Inwood and along Fort Washington Avenue in Washington Heights, older residents are more likely to use checks to pay their bills by mail.

For her part, Ms. Churko said she wrote checks because she was on computers all day at work. “I’m old school when it comes to things like money,” she said. “There are too many stories about cybertheft and identity theft.”

Also, many landlords do not accept electronic payment. A few days into January, Andrew Graham dropped his rent check into a mailbox at Broadway and Dongan Place. He got a call from his bank. Someone had taken the check and written another name over the landlord’s. “Whoever’s committing fraud in this way is really looking for unbanked folks who are mailing out money orders or cash,” he said.

Barbara Kennedy mailed her rent check in a box at Fort Washington Avenue and 183rd Street after the last pickup on Dec. 28. The next morning, she saw the mailbox had been pried open and emptied. She stopped payment. “I put two posts on Facebook to alert people,” Ms. Kennedy said.

People are being advised not to deposit mail after the last pickup of the day or on weekends. “That lets it sit in the box overnight,” said Ms. Harris of the postal inspectors. (She said to report suspicious activity to 212-330-2400 or 911.)

The Police Department also advised using gel ink, which is harder to wash off.

“We’re supposed to write our checks with indelible ink?” Ms. Churko said. “This ticks me off even more.”

Email: dwyer@nytimes.com
Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: In an Age of Cybercrime, Low-Tech Thieves Target Mailboxes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Opinion | The World Needs Answers on Jamal Khashoggi - The New York Times

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The World Needs Answers on Jamal Khashoggi

And President Trump should lead the way in demanding them.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

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President Trump met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House in March to discuss arm sales to Saudi Arabia.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

There is a game being played over the fate of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 and has not been seen since, and it is an unseemly one.

Saudi Arabia has gone silent after some lame denials, evidently waiting to see what it can get away with. Turkey is leaking left and right that it knows exactly what happened — that Mr. Khashoggi was killed almost immediately on entering the consulate and dismembered by a hit squad from Saudi Arabia — but it is reticent about making its evidence public. And the Trump administration, which has embraced the imperious Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, as its star Arab ally, is reluctant to lose him and his sackfuls of arms money.

Mr. Khashoggi had left Saudi Arabia for self-imposed exile in the United States out of fear of retaliation for his criticism of the prince, some of which came in columns he wrote for The Washington Post. If, as seems increasingly likely, Mr. Khashoggi was killed because of his criticism, the United States and other Western nations will have to seriously reconsider their relations with the kingdom.

Not that what they see should come as a huge surprise. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that has long imposed an intolerant form of Islam, with a liberal use of cruel punishments such as beheading, stoning, amputation, lashing and the like. On being named heir last year, Prince Mohammed, 33, generated a reputation as a reformer by allowing women to drive; detaining hundreds of businessmen, including fellow royals, in an “anticorruption” campaign; and proclaiming grand visions for the future. But then he jailed the women who had campaigned for the right to drive and violently overreacted when Canada protested. He is also behind a barbaric war in Yemen, in which American weapons have been used to kill untold thousands of civilians, and a bitter feud with neighboring Qatar.

Basically, he appears to be revealing himself to be a ruthless tyrant, only with a different social and economic agenda from his predecessors. It is not hard to believe that he is behind Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance, especially given the reports of American intelligence intercepts in which Saudi officials discussed a plan to lure Mr. Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia and detain him.

President Trump is obviously troubled by this possibility. “We don’t like it, and we don’t like it even a little bit,” he said on Thursday. But he seems to like even less losing a $110 billion arms deal and a Middle Eastern comrade in arms.

“What good does that do us?” the president asked.

Nonetheless, after lying low for days, the White House is raising the pressure on the Saudis, and Congress is turning up the heat on the White House. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and adviser, the national security adviser, John Bolton, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have asked the crown prince for an explanation. And a bipartisan group of senators has sent a formal letter to the White House demanding an investigation and a decision on sanctions under the Magnitsky Act. Senator Lindsey Graham said there will be hell to pay if the Turkish leaks are confirmed.

More pressure should come from Americans and other foreigners planning to attend a major investor conference in Riyadh this month, which the crown prince is scheduled to attend. The New York Times has already pulled out as a media sponsor; other media companies should follow suit. The absence of major participants such as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin or the chief executives of JPMorgan Chase, the Blackstone Group and Uber would be a strong signal to Saudi Arabia.

At issue here is not only Mr. Khashoggi, however terrible his fate. It is that an absolute monarchy with a dismal record on human rights and justice seems to believe that its vast oil wealth and friends in the White House allow it to act with impunity against critics and perceived foes. The Saudi-led slaughter in Yemen should have stopped American arms sales some time ago; now, unless the Saudis come up with a credible explanation for Mr. Khashoggi’s fate, which is tragically unlikely, business as usual is not an option, however high the cost.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion).

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: The World Needs Answers From the Saudis. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Health - The New York Times

Health

Highlights

  1. Photo
    CreditMauro Poggio, Elisabeth Montabana and Brandon Chu

    Cancer’s Trick for Dodging the Immune System

    In a study of tumors in mice, scientists may have learned why immunotherapy doesn’t work in many patients and what might be done to boost its effectiveness.

    1. Photo
      CreditFrancis R Malasig/EPA, via Shutterstock

      Global health

      Scientists Thought They Had Measles Cornered. They Were Wrong.

      Following intensive vaccination efforts, measles cases plunged across the world. Now clusters of new infections — some linked, some not — have confounded health officials.

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#####EOF##### Sunday Review - The New York Times

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Sunday Review

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#####EOF##### Government Seizes WaMu and Sells Some Assets - The New York Times

Washington Mutual, the giant lender that came to symbolize the excesses of the mortgage boom, was seized by federal regulators on Thursday night, in what is by far the largest bank failure in American history.

Regulators simultaneously brokered an emergency sale of virtually all of Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest savings and loan, to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion, averting another potentially huge taxpayer bill for the rescue of a failing institution.

The move came as lawmakers reached a stalemate over the passage of a $700 billion bailout fund designed to help ailing banks, and removed one of America’s most troubled banks from the financial landscape.

Customers of WaMu, based in Seattle, are unlikely to be affected, although shareholders and some bondholders will be wiped out. WaMu account holders are guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation up to $100,000, and additional deposits will be backed by JPMorgan Chase.

Many WaMu employees came to work Friday wondering about their jobs. JPMorgan executives said that it was too early to know how many employees might be laid off, but industry analysts said the number could be as high as 5,000. Analysts expect the bank to close about 540 branch sites, many that overlap with JPMorgan offices.

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By taking on all of WaMu’s troubled mortgages and credit card loans, JPMorgan Chase will absorb at least $31 billion in losses that would normally have fallen to the F.D.I.C.

JPMorgan Chase, which acquired Bear Stearns only six months ago in another shotgun deal brokered by the government, is to take control Friday of all of WaMu’s deposits and bank branches, creating a nationwide retail franchise that rivals only Bank of America. But JPMorgan will also take on Washington Mutual’s big portfolio of troubled assets, and plans to shut down at least 10 percent of the combined company’s 5,400 branches in markets like New York and Chicago, where they compete. The bank also plans to raise an additional $8 billion by issuing common stock on Friday to pay for the deal.

Washington Mutual, with $307 billion in assets, is by far the biggest bank failure in history, eclipsing the 1984 failure of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust in Chicago, an event that presaged the savings and loan crisis. IndyMac, which was seized by regulators in July, was one-tenth the size of WaMu.

But fears of the fallout from the government takeover of a big bank were balanced with the removal of one of the largest remaining clouds looming over the banking industry.

“This institution was a big question mark about the health of the deposit fund,” Sheila C. Bair, the chairwoman of the F.D.I.C., said on a conference call Thursday. “It was unique in its size and exposure to higher risk mortgages and the distressed housing market. This is the big one that everybody was worried about.” She said that the bank’s rapidly deteriorating condition prompted regulators to seize it Thursday, and not on a Friday as is typical for bank closures.

For weeks, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department were nervous about the fate of WaMu, among the worst-hit by the housing crisis, and pressed hard for the bank to sell itself. Washington Mutual publicly insisted that it could remain independent, but the giant thrift had quietly hired Goldman Sachs about two weeks ago to identify potential bidders. But nobody could make the numbers work and several deadlines passed without anyone submitting a bid.

But as panic gripped financial markets last week after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, WaMu customers started withdrawing their deposits. The government then stepped up its efforts, at points going behind WaMu’s back to work privately with four potential bidders on a deal. On Wednesday afternoon, the government solicited formal written bids. On Thursday morning, regulators notified James Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, that he was the likely winner.“We are building a company,” Mr. Dimon said in a brief interview. “We are kind of lucky to have this opportunity to do this. We always had our eye on it.”

But the seizure and the deal with JPMorgan came as a shock to Washington Mutual’s board, which was kept completely in the dark: the company’s new chief executive, Alan H. Fishman, was in midair, flying from New York to Seattle at the time the deal was finally brokered, according to people briefed on the situation. Mr. Fishman, who has been on the job for less than three weeks, is eligible for $11.6 million in cash severance and will get to keep his $7.5 million signing bonus, according to an analysis by James F. Reda and Associates. WaMu was not immediately available for comment.

The government has dealt with troubled financial institutions differently. Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual, which were less entangled with the rest of the financial system, were allowed to collapse. But the government took emergency measures to stabilize Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the American International Group, the insurance giant.

Federal regulators had been trying to broker a deal for Washington Mutual because a takeover by the F.D.I.C. would have dealt a crushing blow to the federal government’s deposit insurance fund. The fund, which stood at $45.2 billion at the end of June, has been severely depleted after suffering a loss from the sudden collapse of IndyMac Bank. Analysts say that a failure of Washington Mutual would have cost the fund as much as $30 billion or more.

The deal will end WaMu’s 119-year run as an independent company and give JPMorgan Chase branches in California and other markets where it does not have a big presence.

Until recently, Washington Mutual was one of Wall Street’s strongest performers. It reaped big profits quarter after quarter as its then chief executive, Kerry K. Killinger, enlarged its presence by buying banks on both coasts and ramping up mortgage lending.

His goal was to transform what was once a sleepy Seattle thrift into the “Wal-Mart of Banking,” which would cater to lower- and middle-class consumers that other banks deemed too risky. It offered complex mortgages and credit cards whose terms made it easy for the least creditworthy borrowers to get financing, a strategy the bank extended in big cities, including Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. With this grand plan, Mr. Killinger built Washington Mutual into the sixth-largest bank in the United States.

But underneath the hood, the bank’s machinery was failing.

Then the housing market began to crumble. Like so many other financial institutions, the bank tried to hedge its mortgage bets — but did so poorly. It retrenched on its branch-building ambitions. But none of that was enough to deflate ballooning losses on mortgage loans, nor defuse ticking time bombs like interest-only and pay-option amortization products that had reeled in bottom-grade borrowers.

With rising mortgage payments and higher gas and food bills, WaMu’s losses in its big credit card loan portfolio also surged.

By then, however, WaMu’s troubles had set off alarm bells on Wall Street, which ground its share price down daily.

With options narrowing, WaMu frantically reached out to several banks and big private equity firms, including the Carlyle Group and the Blackstone Group.

In March, JPMorgan Chase saw an opportunity and urged WaMu in a letter to consider a quick deal. On the same weekend that Mr. Dimon negotiated his daring takeover of Bear Stearns, he secretly dispatched members of his team to Seattle to meet with WaMu executives. When JPMorgan Chase offered WaMu $8 a share, largely in stock. But Mr. Killinger balked at the deal.

In April, David Bonderman, a founder of the TPG private equity firm, and a group of institutional investors agreed to infuse $7 billion of capital into the bank. Mr. Killinger kept his job, and Mr. Bonderman, who had served as a WaMu director from 1997 to 2002, returned with a board seat and 176 million WaMu shares priced at about $8.75 each — steep discount of more than 25 percent to that day’s share price.

While the deal was sweet for Mr. Bonderman, it eroded the value for existing shareholders, enraging them. They moved on June 2 to strip Mr. Killinger of his chairmanship. Mr. Bonderman, meanwhile, watched his golden bet turn to dross. In a statement Thursday, TPG said: “Obviously, we are dissatisfied with the loss to our partners from our investment in Washington Mutual.”

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#####EOF##### If It’s Too Big to Fail, Is It Too Big to Exist? - The New York Times
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Credit Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News

Nearly a century ago, the jurist Louis Brandeis railed against what he called the “curse of bigness.” He warned that banks, railroads and steel companies had grown so huge that they were lording it over the nation’s economic and political life.

“Size, we are told, is not a crime,” Brandeis wrote. “But size may, at least, become noxious by reason of the means through which it is attained or the uses to which it is put.”

Today, amid the wreckage of the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, bigness is one of our biggest problems. Major banks, the Detroit automakers, the financial basket case that is the American International Group — the only reason these giant, sclerotic companies are still standing is that they have been deemed “too big to fail.”

Or, more precisely, too big to be allowed to fail. Policy makers fear companies like these are so enormous and so intertwined in the fabric of the economy that their collapse would be catastrophic. Hence, all those multibillion-dollar, taxpayer-financed bailouts.

In its overhaul of financial regulation last week, the Obama administration proposed several measures to try to contain the biggest of America’s big banks. But it stopped far short of calling for the dismantling of those institutions.

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A few Jeremiahs within the administration wanted more. They contended that the biggest banks must be streamlined, and that, in the future, banks should not be allowed to grow to the point where they pose a threat to the financial system. But they are losing a battle to other officials and banking executives who argue that such radical steps would be impracticable and deal yet another blow to the nation’s damaged financial industry. Washington, the argument goes, let banks grow into behemoths in the first place. Now, all of us must live with the consequences.

But if a company is too big to fail, should it be considered too big to exist? Brandeis worried that the corporate giants of his day would imperil democracy through concentrated economic power. His essays, collected in book form and published in 1914 under the title, “Other People’s Money — and How the Bankers Use It,” helped drum up support for the creation of the Federal Reserve System, antitrust laws and trust busting.

One dissenter within the administration — Sheila C. Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — says the government must stamp out the notion that Washington will ride to the rescue if big banks run into trouble. Investors must understand that they will lose money even if the government has to step in, she says.

“The reality is there are investors and creditors out there that have relied on ‘too big to fail’ to make investment decisions,” Ms. Bair said. “We have to take this security blanket away.”

That is easy to say, but not so easy to do.

“You have to be flexible,” said Andrew Williams, a Treasury Department spokesman. “You have to be clear that there is not a presumption of too big to fail. But you can’t give it up entirely because to do so may not allow you to avoid, in extremis, a major meltdown.” Lawrence H. Summers, the White House economic adviser, says there is no going back to the days of small banks. The financial world has moved on. “I don’t think you can completely turn back the clock,” he said.

Policy makers argue that shackling some of the very biggest banks with new rules will keep the behemoths from getting into trouble. The overhaul of financial regulation proposed last week by the Obama administration would provide so-called resolution powers that would allow big, complex financial institutions to, in fact, fail and let regulators take them over. The government could then wind down giant financial companies over time, as it does with smaller ones.

The administration also wants greater regulatory scrutiny and higher capital requirements for financial companies that pose so-called “systemic” threats. Details about these proposals are sparse, but the thinking is that investors would press companies to curb their risks and streamline their operations if bigness had some drawbacks.

That is not enough for some. Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman and current White House adviser, for instance, has suggested that the government limit how much money big institutions can wager trading. The way things are now, banks reap profits if their trades pan out, but taxpayers can be stuck picking up the tab if their big bets sink the company.

Ms. Bair and others argue that the government should impose fees on giant banks to encourage them to operate more carefully and offset some of the costs of rescuing big institutions. The administration’s plan imposes such a charge only after a government rescue occurs.

Bigness has always been a powerful American theme. But in business, where many executives live by the creed of “Grow or Die,” it is dogma. Devotees of economic Darwinism insist that corporate size, and its accompanying economies of scale, brings progress and benefits to consumers.

But how big is too big to fail? And how would you measure it anyway? In the case of banks and giants like A.I.G. and Fannie Mae, policy makers argue that the interconnectedness of modern finance, as much as the size of the players, is the real issue. The collapse of one big financial company could cascade through the industry. In the case of General Motors and Chrysler, a failure could mean that thousands of jobs — not only at those companies, but at their suppliers as well — could evaporate.

The too-big-to-fail doctrine, sometimes called T.B.T.F., goes back at least as far as Brandeis’ time, when, in 1914, the Treasury stepped in to provide financial aid to New York City. In the 1980s, when the government rescued Continental Illinois Bank, Stewart B. McKinney, a Connecticut Congressman, declared that the government had created a new class of banks, those too big to fail. The phrase returned and stuck.

Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, often uses a wonkish euphemism. He refers to Brobdingnagian banks as “systemically critical” institutions. The Obama administration rolled out another description last week: “Tier 1 Financial Holding Companies.”

What is remarkable is that, even now, the T.B.T.F. club and some of its members are actually growing, not shrinking. A decade-long run of mergers in the banking industry has concentrated power in fewer hands. Last autumn, when the financial crisis was at its height, policy makers pushed some banks to buy weaker ones to head off failures. (See Merrill Lynch, acquisition of, among others.)

Frederic S. Mishkin, a former Federal Reserve governor from 2006 to 2008, for one, said there could be no turning back on too big to fail. “You can’t put that genie in the bottle again,” he said. “We are going to have to deal with it.”

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#####EOF##### What Eats What: A Landlubber’s Guide to Deep Sea Dining - The New York Times

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What Eats What: A Landlubber’s Guide to Deep Sea Dining

You’ll never go to dinner in the deep sea. It’s dark, vast and weird down there. If the pressure alone didn’t destroy your land-bound body, some hungry sea creature would probably try to eat you.

Fortunately for you, something else has spent a lot of time down there, helping to prepare this guide to deep sea dining.

For nearly three decades, robots with cameras deployed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute have glided through the ocean off the coast of central California at depths as deep as two and a half miles below.

Cameras on these remotely operated vehicles captured the feeding habits of anything that didn’t flee them. They revealed 242 unique feeding relationships comprising 84 different predators and 82 different prey items. Building on prior research using other methods, these videos enhance understanding of the deep sea food web, particularly the jelly dishes and diners.

Image
A remotely operated underwater vehicle, or R.O.V., deployed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which captured images of underwater creatures devouring each other — at least, those that didn’t flee it.CreditAnela Choy/Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

It was once thought that these wobbly mounds of water were not worth being eaten. But thanks to the cameras mounted on the researchers’ underwater probes — and elsewhere on penguins, monk seals and sea turtles — we now realize that gelatinous animals aren’t just ravenous predators invading the ocean, but major food items in a complex web of interactions.

You’re probably more familiar with that web as a chain, ending in the tuna on your dinner plate. That beautiful hunk of red meat was once a top predator. But if it weren’t for the food web deep under the ocean — a whole collection of crustaceans, worms, fish, jellies and squids feasting on one another miles below the fishing boat that caught your tuna — there’d be no food to forage and no tuna to catch.

“It’s really exciting and really important,” said Anela Choy, a marine biologist at MBARI, who led the study published this month in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “It’s taking a bigger view and allowing you to see a lot more of the connectivity of the ocean ecosystem.”

So let’s go eat.

No one knows exactly what species this creature is, but Dr. Choy calls it a galaxy siphonophore. It waits in the water for whatever swims into its orange curtain of tentacles.

The deep sea can be a tough place to find food, and the creatures that live down here have adapted to its fickle abundance. They don’t just use tentacles to grab unwitting prey.

Consider detritivores, including crustaceans and even some jellies that eat them: They munch on decaying organic matter called “marine snow” that sinks down to the bottom from sloppy feeders or phytoplankton near the surface. And the black swallower fish: It uses its big jaw to swallow prey bigger than itself whole, like a snake. These different species show there are diverse ways to fill your belly in an unforgiving environment.

One of the most common interactions that Dr. Choy and her colleagues observed were cephalopods like this Gonatus, preying on fish.

Gonatid squid, like the one in this picture, are abundant in midwaters and play the role of both predator and prey in the food web. Endowed with an insane metabolism, the voracious cephalopods are constantly eating. They dine on deep sea fish including lantern fish, owl fish and dragon fish.

The species ranges in size from six inches to a foot long, but it can consume fish bigger than its own body. To do so, the squid grasps onto its prey with tentacles lined with hooks and suction cups. Then it pierces the fish’s brain with its beak, which is creepily located right between the squid’s eyes. It bites off pieces of fish flesh, which it chews and swallows through an esophagus in the center of its brain.

Image
CreditMonterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

That’s a gonatid squid eating a gonatid squid. This kind of cannibalism is common in the deep sea. And for the squid it can be beneficial. By eating competitors from within its species, a Gonatus may free up more food and find more opportunities to mate.

But they don’t just eat one another. Other species of squid, swordfish, bottle-nosed whales, sperm whales, hooded seal and other marine animals eat Gonatus too.

This Solmissus is also called a dinner plate jelly because it’s the size and shape of one. In this video it’s eating a ctenophore. But you wouldn’t know if we didn’t show it. Try to collect a ctenophore, and it will disintegrate in your hands.

In the deep sea, jellyfish from the narcomedusae order are quite abundant. MBARI’s recordings revealed that they are major predators, consuming nearly two dozen different sea creatures including other gelatinous animals, especially ctenophores or comb jellies, worms and krill.

Crustaceans, hard-bodied creatures like krill and shrimp, are like dinner rolls of the deep sea. They’re always around, and practically everyone eats them.

This lobate ctenophore is eating krill. But their appetites for crustaceans are nothing compared with physonect siphonophores, gelatinous animals that live in long chains.

Some eat all kinds of crustaceans, the researchers found, but Nanomia, siphonophores that are quite abundant off the central California coast, feed almost exclusively on krill — just like a filter-feeding whale.

Correction: 

Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article gave the wrong name for an organism being eaten by a ctenophore. It is a krill, not a mysid. Additionally, using information provided by a research institution, the fish being eaten by a squid was misidentified. It was a melamphaid, not a bathylagid.

Produced by Michael Roston

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#####EOF##### Ben Hubbard

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Ben Hubbard is the Beirut bureau chief for The Times. An Arabic speaker with more than a decade in the Middle East, he has covered coups, civil wars, protests, jihadist groups, rotten fish as cuisine, religion and pop culture from more than a dozen countries, including Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Yemen. More

Ben Hubbard is the Beirut bureau chief for The Times. An Arabic speaker with more than a decade in the Middle East, he has covered coups, civil wars, protests, jihadist groups, rotten fish as cuisine, religion and pop culture from more than a dozen countries, including Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Yemen.

Before becoming a journalist, Mr. Hubbard studied history in Chicago, Arabic in Cairo and journalism in Berkeley, and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo, West Africa. A Colorado native, he lives in Beirut with his wife, a clown. They have no pets.

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    They Thought It Was Their Uber. But the Driver Was a Predator.

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#####EOF##### Koobface Gang That Spread Worm on Facebook Operates in the Open - The New York Times

Five men believed to be responsible for spreading a notorious computer worm on Facebook and other social networks — and pocketing several million dollars from online schemes — are hiding in plain sight in St. Petersburg, Russia, according to investigators at Facebook and several independent computer security researchers.

The men live comfortable lives in St. Petersburg — and have frolicked on luxury vacations in places like Monte Carlo, Bali and, earlier this month, Turkey, according to photographs posted on social network sites — even though their identities have been known for years to Facebook, computer security investigators and law enforcement officials.

One member of the group, which is popularly known as the Koobface gang, has regularly broadcast the coordinates of its offices by checking in on Foursquare, a location-based social network, and posting the news to Twitter. Photographs on Foursquare also show other suspected members of the group working on Macs in a loftlike room that looks like offices used by tech start-ups in cities around the world.

Beginning in July 2008, the Koobface gang aimed at Web users with invitations to watch a funny or sexy video. Those curious enough to click the link got a message to update their computer’s Flash software, which begins the download of the Koobface malware. Victims’ computers are drafted into a “botnet,” or network of infected PCs, and are sent official-looking advertisements of fake antivirus software and their Web searches are also hijacked and the clicks delivered to unscrupulous marketers. The group made money from people who bought the bogus software and from unsuspecting advertisers.

The security software firm Kaspersky Labs has estimated the network includes 400,000 to 800,000 PCs worldwide at its height in 2010. Victims are often unaware their machines have been compromised.

Continue reading the main story

The Koobface gang’s freedom underscores how hard it is to apprehend international computer criminals, even when identities are known. These groups tend to operate in countries where they can work unmolested by the local authorities, and where cooperation with United States and European law enforcement agencies is poor. Meanwhile, Western law enforcement is awash in computer crime and lacks the resources and skilled manpower to tackle it effectively, especially when evidence putting individuals’ fingers on keyboards must be collected abroad.

On Tuesday, Facebook plans to announce that it will begin sharing information about the group and how to fight them with security researchers and other Internet companies. It believes public namings can make it harder for such groups to operate and send a message to the criminal underground.

None of the men have been charged with a crime and no law enforcement agencies have confirmed they are under investigation.

The group investigators have identified has adopted the tongue-in-cheek name, Ali Baba & 4: Anton Korotchenko, who uses the online nickname “KrotReal”; Stanislav Avdeyko, known as “leDed”; Svyatoslav E. Polichuck, who goes by “PsViat” and “PsycoMan”; Roman P. Koturbach, who uses the online moniker “PoMuc”; and Alexander Koltyshev, or “Floppy.” )

Efforts to contact members of the group for comment have been unsuccessful.

Weeks after early versions of the Koobface worm began appearing on Facebook, investigators inside the company were able to trace the attacks to those responsible. “We’ve had a picture of one of the guys in a scuba mask on our wall since 2008,” said Ryan McGeehan, manager of investigations and incident response at Facebook.

Since then, Facebook and several independent security researchers have provided law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with information and evidence. Most notably, Jan Droemer, a 32-year-old independent researcher in Germany, has provided important information and leads, including a password-free view inside Koobface’s command-and-control system, known as the “Mothership.” Mr. Droemer spent nights and weekends for four months in late 2009 and early 2010 unmasking the gang members using only information available publicly on the Internet.

The F.B.I. declined to comment.

That computer crime pays is fueling a boom that is leaving few Internet users and businesses unscathed. The toll on consumers alone is estimated at $114 billion annually worldwide, according to a September 2011 study by the security software maker Symantec.

Photo
A member of the Koobface gang posted to Foursquare, showing an office, complete with coordinates, in St. Petersburg.

Russia, in particular, has a reputation as a hacker haven, although it has pursued several prominent cases against spammers recently. The Soviet education system’s emphasis on math and science combined with post-Communist economic collapse and weak private industry meant there were many highly trained engineers, but few legitimate outlets for their skills, said Vsevolod Gunitskiy, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.

“Russia is sort of a perfect storm for cybercrime,” he said. The proliferation of organized crime and official corruption created “this very strong legacy of contempt for the laws and general culture of criminality.”

The Russian Embassy in Washington said it does not have any information regarding this group and that American law enforcement officials had never contacted the embassy on this issue.

The men investigators believe are behind Koobface look a lot like ordinary software enthusiasts, albeit with more tattoos and an outlaw persona. Mr. Avdeyko, who is two decades older than the other men and has been tied to an infamous spyware program dating to 2003 called CoolWebSearch, appears to hold a leadership role.

He and at least two of the other men have worked in the world of online pornography, said Mr. Droemer. Mr. Korotchenko and several of the other men apparently tried to run a legitimate mobile software and services business, colorfully named MobSoft Ltd. They did not reply to e-mails requesting interviews.

Mr. Droemer said the gang’s success was more attributable to workaday persistence and willingness to adapt than technical sophistication. They could have spread Koobface to many more PCs, he said. “They could have done a lot more technical things to make it more perfect, more marvelous. But there was just no need to do it. They were just investing as much to get the revenue they wanted to get.”

The group cleverly harnessed the infrastructures of powerful online services — from Facebook and Twitter to Google’s search engine and Blogger — to do the heavy lifting, and may have run its enterprise with just a few computers.

Koobface will probably earn its place in history for pioneering and leading the criminal exploitation of social networks, rather than the size of its profits. Data found in the botnet’s command-and-control system suggests the group has earned at least $2 million a year for the 3 1/2 years of its existence, although the actual total is very likely higher, Mr. Droemer said.

Experts say the gang could have further enriched itself through identity fraud, since it has had access to millions of PCs and social-network profiles, but that there is no evidence it has done so.

Indeed, in a 2009 Christmas e-card to security researchers left inside victim computers, the gang vowed it would never steal credit card or banking information. It called viruses “something awful.” Its tactics have been less ruthless than those of many other hacker groups, experts said. For instance, it has never deployed malicious programs that install automatically, and rather has required its victims to make several unwise clicks.

While the Koobface gang operates freely, Facebook has focused on building elaborate defenses against the worm, which relentlessly struck the site again and again until disappearing in March. The gang abandoned the site after Facebook mounted a major counteroffensive, which included an effort to dismantle the command-and-control system of the botnet and a simultaneous push to scrub its network of the worm and clean up infections in users’ PCs.

“We fired all the different guns at the same time,” said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer at Facebook. “If we could literally shut down the command-and-control, all the infections, and just make them have to start over from scratch in all contexts, we figured they might decide to move on.” He hoped they would conclude Facebook was unprofitable, he said.

But Facebook’s effort and two earlier takedown efforts by security researchers — including one by the Bulgarian researcher Dancho Danchev, who revealed the name of one Koobface member on his blog last week — have failed put an end to Koobface, and smaller sites continue to suffer.

“People who engage in this type of stuff need to know that their name and real identity are going to come out eventually and they’re going to get arrested and they’re going to be targeted,” Mr. Sullivan said. “People are fighting back.”

Correction: January 19, 2012

An article on Tuesday about the Koobface gang, a Russian group believed to be responsible for spreading a notorious computer worm on social networks, misspelled the surname of one man identified by investigators as a member of the group. He is Alexander Koltyshev, not Koltysehv.

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#####EOF##### Obama Lets N.S.A. Exploit Some Internet Flaws, Officials Say - The New York Times

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Obama Lets N.S.A. Exploit Some Internet Flaws, Officials Say

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Edward J. Snowden, the N.S.A. leaker, speaking to European officials via videoconference last week.CreditCreditFrederick Florin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.

But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.

The White House has never publicly detailed Mr. Obama’s decision, which he made in January as he began a three-month review of recommendations by a presidential advisory committee on what to do in response to recent disclosures about the National Security Agency.

But elements of the decision became evident on Friday, when the White House denied that it had any prior knowledge of the Heartbleed bug, a newly known hole in Internet security that sent Americans scrambling last week to change their online passwords. The White House statement said that when such flaws are discovered, there is now a “bias” in the government to share that knowledge with computer and software manufacturers so a remedy can be created and distributed to industry and consumers.

Caitlin Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said the review of the recommendations was now complete, and it had resulted in a “reinvigorated” process to weigh the value of disclosure when a security flaw is discovered, against the value of keeping the discovery secret for later use by the intelligence community.

“This process is biased toward responsibly disclosing such vulnerabilities,” she said.

Until now, the White House has declined to say what action Mr. Obama had taken on this recommendation of the president’s advisory committee, whose report is better known for its determination that the government get out of the business of collecting bulk telephone data about the calls made by every American. Mr. Obama announced last month that he would end the bulk collection, and leave the data in the hands of telecommunications companies, with a procedure for the government to obtain it with court orders when needed.

But while the surveillance recommendations were noteworthy, inside the intelligence agencies other recommendations, concerning encryption and cyber operations, set off a roaring debate with echoes of the Cold War battles that dominated Washington a half-century ago.

One recommendation urged the N.S.A. to get out of the business of weakening commercial encryption systems or trying to build in “back doors” that would make it far easier for the agency to crack the communications of America’s adversaries. Tempting as it was to create easy ways to break codes — the reason the N.S.A. was established by Harry S. Truman 62 years ago — the committee concluded that the practice would undercut trust in American software and hardware products. In recent months, Silicon Valley companies have urged the United States to abandon such practices, while Germany and Brazil, among other nations, have said they were considering shunning American-made equipment and software. Their motives were hardly pure: Foreign companies see the N.S.A. disclosures as a way to bar American competitors.

Another recommendation urged the government to make only the most limited, temporary use of what hackers call “zero days,” the coding flaws in software like Microsoft Windows that can give an attacker access to a computer — and to any business, government agency or network connected to it. The flaws get their name from the fact that, when identified, the computer user has “zero days” to fix them before hackers can exploit the accidental vulnerability.

The N.S.A. made use of four “zero day” vulnerabilities in its attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites. That operation, code-named “Olympic Games,” managed to damage roughly 1,000 Iranian centrifuges, and by some accounts helped drive the country to the negotiating table.

Not surprisingly, officials at the N.S.A. and at its military partner, the United States Cyber Command, warned that giving up the capability to exploit undisclosed vulnerabilities would amount to “unilateral disarmament” — a phrase taken from the battles over whether and how far to cut America’s nuclear arsenal.

“We don’t eliminate nuclear weapons until the Russians do,” one senior intelligence official said recently. “You are not going to see the Chinese give up on ‘zero days’ just because we do.” Even a senior White House official who was sympathetic to broad reforms after the N.S.A. disclosures said last month, “I can’t imagine the president — any president — entirely giving up a technology that might enable him some day to take a covert action that could avoid a shooting war.”

At the center of that technology are the kinds of hidden gaps in the Internet — almost always created by mistake or oversight — that Heartbleed created. There is no evidence that the N.S.A. had any role in creating Heartbleed, or even that it made use of it. When the White House denied prior knowledge of Heartbleed on Friday afternoon, it appeared to be the first time that the N.S.A. had ever said whether a particular flaw in the Internet was — or was not — in the secret library it keeps at Fort Meade, Md., the headquarters of the agency and Cyber Command.

But documents released by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, make it clear that two years before Heartbleed became known, the N.S.A. was looking at ways to accomplish exactly what the flaw did by accident. A program code-named Bullrun, apparently named for the site of two Civil War battles just outside Washington, was part of a decade-long effort to crack or circumvent encryption on the web. The documents do not make clear how well it succeeded, but it may well have been more effective than exploiting Heartbleed would be at enabling access to secret data.

The government has become one of the biggest developers and purchasers of information identifying “zero days,” officials acknowledge. Those flaws are big business — Microsoft pays up to $150,000 to those who find them and bring them to the company to fix — and other countries are gathering them so avidly that something of a modern-day arms race has broken out. Chief among the nations seeking them are China and Russia, though Iran and North Korea are in the market as well.

“Cyber as an offensive weapon will become bigger and bigger,” said Michael DeCesare, who runs the McAfee computer security operations of Intel Corporation. “I don’t think any amount of policy alone will stop them” from doing what they are doing, he said of the Russians, the Chinese and others. “That’s why effective command and control strategies are absolutely imperative on our side.”

The presidential advisory committee did not urge the N.S.A. to get out of the business entirely. But it said that the president should make sure the N.S.A. does not “engineer vulnerabilities” into commercial encryption systems. And it said that if the United States finds a “zero day,” it should patch it, not exploit it, with one exception: Senior officials could “briefly authorize using a zero day for high priority intelligence protection.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Lets N.S.A. Exploit Some Internet Flaws, Officials Say. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### When a Company Is Put Up for Sale, in Many Cases, Your Personal Data Is, Too - The New York Times

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When a Company Is Put Up for Sale, in Many Cases, Your Personal Data Is, Too

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The privacy policy for Hulu, a video-streaming service with about nine million subscribers, opens with a declaration that the company “respects your privacy.”

That respect could lapse, however, if the company is ever sold or goes bankrupt. At that point, according to a clause several screens deep in the policy, the host of details that Hulu can gather about subscribers — names, birth dates, email addresses, videos watched, device locations and more — could be transferred to “one or more third parties as part of the transaction.” The policy does not promise to contact users if their data changes hands.

Provisions like that act as a sort of data fire sale clause. They are becoming standard among the most popular sites, according to a recent analysis by The New York Times of the top 100 websites in the United States as ranked by Alexa, an Internet analytics firm.

Of the 99 sites with English-language terms of service or privacy policies, 85 said they might transfer users’ information if a merger, acquisition, bankruptcy, asset sale or other transaction occurred, The Times’s analysis found. The sites with these provisions include prominent consumer technology companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn, in addition to Hulu.

“It’s ‘we are never going to sell your data, except if we need to or sell the company,’ ” Hal F. Morris, the assistant attorney general of Texas, said about industry practices.

Hulu declined to comment.

Sites, apps, data brokers and marketing analytics firms are gathering more and more details about people’s personal lives — from their social connections and health concerns to the ways they toggle between their devices. The intelligence is often used to help tailor online experiences or marketing pitches. Such data can also potentially be used to make inferences about people’s financial status, addictions, medical conditions, fitness, politics or religion in ways they may not want or like.

When sites and apps get acquired or go bankrupt, the consumer data they have amassed may be among the companies’ most valuable assets. And that has created an incentive for some online services to collect vast databases on people without giving them the power to decide which companies, or industries, may end up with their information.

“In effect, there’s a race to the bottom as companies make representations that are weak and provide little actual privacy protection to consumers,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research center in Washington.

The potential ramifications of the fire sale provisions became clear two years ago when True.com, a dating site based in Plano, Tex., that was going through a bankruptcy proceeding, tried to sell its customer database on 43 million members to a dating site based in Canada. The profiles included consumers’ names, birth dates, sexual orientation, race, religion, criminal convictions, photos, videos, contact information and more.

Because the site’s privacy policy had promised never to sell or share members’ personal details without their permission, Texas was able to intervene to stop the sale of customer data, including intimate details on about two million Texans.

“That is the type of information that people were entitled not to have trafficked and sold to the highest bidder,” said Mr. Morris, the Texas assistant attorney general. “I think it’s an important safety issue for consumers.”

If privacy policies contain unrestricted data-transfer provisions, however, consumers and government authorities have little recourse.

Among the top 100 sites in the Times analysis, at least 17 said they would alert consumers — by, for example, posting a notice on their site — if users’ personal details changed hands. But only Etsy, the crafts e-retailer, Weather.com and a few other sites promised to allow people to opt out of having their data handed over to a third party in certain circumstances.

Jordan Breslow, Etsy’s general counsel, said that enabling the site’s members to control their personal information tallied with the company’s values of respect for consumer trust.

(The privacy policy of The New York Times says that, in the event of a business transaction, consumers’ information may be included among transferred assets. It does not promise to notify users if such a situation were ever to occur.)

After one data-driven service buys another, it can leave consumers questioning how their details will be used. Unless the company has made a previous promise to inform them or the data is specifically regulated by a law like the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, sites and apps generally do not need to be notified about transfers of their information.

Last year, for instance, Facebook bought WhatsApp, the stand-alone messaging service, for nearly $22 billion. Subsequently, some people who regularly used both services, like Neil Kirkpatrick, a digital project manager in Berkhamsted, England, began to notice some odd coincidences.

“Added someone to my iPhone contacts to chat on @WhatsApp and now Facebook is recommending them as a friend,” Mr. Kirkpatrick wrote on Twitter recently.

In a phone interview, Mr. Kirkpatrick said he had not permitted Facebook access to his contact list and had set his Facebook profile to prevent people outside his network from using his phone number to locate him. So he did not understand how Facebook could have connected him to new contacts on WhatsApp.

“They could do a lot more to be upfront and honest about what information they have on you and where they are getting it,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said. “It doesn’t feel like you are in control of your own data.”

Jonathan Thaw, a Facebook spokesman, said Facebook did not use contact information from WhatsApp. He added that Facebook used a variety of factors — such as mutual friends, work and education information — to suggest friends.

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Hal Morris, assistant attorney general of Texas, helped block the dating site True.com from selling data on 43 million members.CreditSandy Carson for The New York Times

WhatsApp did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Some sites first adopted fire sale clauses after the Federal Trade Commission in 2000 sued Toysmart.com, a bankrupt online toy retailer, for deceptive practices regarding data gleaned from its site visitors. Toysmart was seeking to sell customer details — including their children’s names and birth dates — even though the company’s privacy policy had promised never to share that information with third parties.

In an effort to avoid similar complaints, other sites began claiming the right to sell or share user data as part of business transactions.

It’s a trend that is likely to widen as companies introduce new Internet-enabled products, like connected cars and video cameras, which can collect and transmit a constant stream of data to the cloud.

Rather than wade through companies’ data-use policies before registering with websites, however, many people simply click the agree button.

“I think society views it as what you have to do to get to the next page of the website,” said Elise S. Frejka, a lawyer who served as the consumer privacy ombudsman in the recent RadioShack bankruptcy case.

But reading through a site’s data-sharing policies can be a confounding experience.

One example is Nest, an Internet-connected thermostat company that enables people to control their home energy use via their mobile devices. Acquired by Google for $3.2 billion last year, Nest has different online privacy pages with seemingly conflicting statements.

One page, in colloquial English, says that the company values trust: “It’s why we work hard to protect your data. And why your info is not for sale. To anyone.”

Another page, containing Nest’s official privacy policy, however, says: “Upon the sale or transfer of the company and/or all or part of its assets, your personal information may be among the items sold or transferred.”

In an email, Alexandra Zoz Cuccias, a Nest spokeswoman, said the two statements were “not contradictory.”

The information on the first page, she wrote, “is meant to be very clear and explain how we think about privacy, in part by helping users understand how our business does and does not work.” For instance, she said, Nest does not sell its customer lists to third parties.

In the actual privacy policy that indicates that customer data may be included as part of a company asset sale, she said, “we provide a necessarily more detailed discussion to users about the specific ways Nest uses and processes data.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: When a Company Is Put Up for Sale, in Many Cases, Your Personal Data Is, Too. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Love - The New York Times

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    One Wedding Ceremony and 12 Tiny Receptions

    A couple broke down their celebration into intimate dinner parties rather than a large banquet-hall gathering. They called it the Deconstructed Reception. Here’s how they did it.

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    Vows

    For Two Longtime Acquaintances, a Second Chance at Love

    Caroline Walradt and Peter Travers met in church in the early 2000s, but not until fairly recently did they see each other as more than friends.

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    Why Wedding Expos Are Still a Thing

    Personal contacts, prizes and swag bags stuffed with freebies and discounts. You won’t get that kind of instant gratification on Instagram, Zola and Etsy.

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    She Developed a Filter. He Became More Outgoing.

    She had an affair during their first engagement. After heartbreak, a lot of time and forgiveness, they found their way back to each other.

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    Megan Keane, Alexander Roithmayr

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    And You Thought Your Family Was Modern

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    Assisted by StubHub and Beyoncé

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    Drawn Together by a Sense of Adventure

    The couple met in June 2013 at an airport in Bogotá, Colombia. He was returning from a 10,000-mile motorcycle trip that began in New York and ended in Peru.

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    Until Honeymoon We Do Part

    First the wedding, now for some me time! They’re called solomoons — couples taking separate trips after the ceremony.

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    Tips for Creating the Perfect Wedding Hashtag

    With a designated #WeddingHashtag, guests can post photos on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media, serving as personal paparazzi.

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    She Watches Weddings, One Click at a Time

    The photographer Genevieve de Manio said, “A truly good image stirs something in you when you see it, a feeling of adoration, love, sorrow, joy, hope, or surprise.”

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#####EOF##### As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential - The New York Times

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As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential

Imagine receiving a phone call from your aging mother seeking your help because she has forgotten her banking password.

Except it’s not your mother. The voice on the other end of the phone call just sounds deceptively like her.

It is actually a computer-synthesized voice, a tour-de-force of artificial intelligence technology that has been crafted to make it possible for someone to masquerade via the telephone.

Such a situation is still science fiction — but just barely. It is also the future of crime.

The software components necessary to make such masking technology widely accessible are advancing rapidly. Recently, for example, DeepMind, the Alphabet subsidiary known for a program that has bested some of the top human players in the board game Go, announced that it had designed a program that “mimics any human voice and which sounds more natural than the best existing text-to-speech systems, reducing the gap with human performance by over 50 percent.”

The irony, of course, is that this year the computer security industry, with $75 billion in annual revenue, has started to talk about how machine learning and pattern recognition techniques will improve the woeful state of computer security.

But there is a downside.

“The thing people don’t get is that cybercrime is becoming automated and it is scaling exponentially,” said Marc Goodman, a law enforcement agency adviser and the author of “Future Crimes.” He added, “This is not about Matthew Broderick hacking from his basement,” a reference to the 1983 movie “War Games.”

The alarm about malevolent use of advanced artificial intelligence technologies was sounded earlier this year by James R. Clapper, the director of National Intelligence. In his annual review of security, Mr. Clapper underscored the point that while A.I. systems would make some things easier, they would also expand the vulnerabilities of the online world.

The growing sophistication of computer criminals can be seen in the evolution of attack tools like the widely used malicious program known as Blackshades, according to Mr. Goodman. The author of the program, a Swedish national, was convicted last year in the United States.

The system, which was sold widely in the computer underground, functioned as a “criminal franchise in a box,” Mr. Goodman said. It allowed users without technical skills to deploy computer ransomware or perform video or audio eavesdropping with a mouse click.

The next generation of these tools will add machine learning capabilities that have been pioneered by artificial intelligence researchers to improve the quality of machine vision, speech understanding, speech synthesis and natural language understanding. Some computer security researchers believe that digital criminals have been experimenting with the use of A.I. technologies for more than half a decade.

That can be seen in efforts to subvert the internet’s omnipresent Captcha — Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart — the challenge-and-response puzzle invented in 2003 by Carnegie Mellon University researchers to block automated programs from stealing online accounts.

Both “white hat” artificial intelligence researchers and “black hat” criminals have been deploying machine vision software to subvert Captchas for more than half a decade, said Stefan Savage, a computer security researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

“If you don’t change your Captcha for two years, you will be owned by some machine vision algorithm,” he said.

Surprisingly, one thing that has slowed the development of malicious A.I. has been the ready availability of either low-cost or free human labor. For example, some cybercriminals have farmed out Captcha-breaking schemes to electronic sweatshops where humans are used to decode the puzzles for a tiny fee.

Even more inventive computer crooks have used online pornography as a reward for human web surfers who break the Captcha, Mr. Goodman said. Free labor is a commodity that A.I. software won’t be able to compete with any time soon.

So what’s next?

Criminals, for starters, can piggyback on new tech developments. Voice-recognition technology like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana are now used extensively to interact with computers. And Amazon’s Echo voice-controlled speaker and Facebook’s Messenger chatbot platform are rapidly becoming conduits for online commerce and customer support. As is often the case, whenever a communication advancement like voice recognition starts to go mainstream, criminals looking to take advantage of it aren’t far behind.

“I would argue that companies that offer customer support via chatbots are unwittingly making themselves liable to social engineering,” said Brian Krebs, an investigative reporter who publishes at krebsonsecurity.com.

Social engineering, which refers to the practice of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging information, is widely seen as the weakest link in the computer security chain. Cybercriminals already exploit the best qualities in humans — trust and willingness to help others — to steal and spy. The ability to create artificial intelligence avatars that can fool people online will only make the problem worse.

This can already be seen in efforts by state governments and political campaigns who are using chatbot technology widely for political propaganda.

Researchers have coined the term “computational propaganda” to describe the explosion of deceptive social media campaigns on services like Facebook and Twitter.

In a recent research paper, Philip N. Howard, a sociologist at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Bence Kollanyi, a researcher at Corvinus University of Budapest, described how political chatbots had a “small but strategic role” in shaping the online conversation during the run-up to the “Brexit” referendum.

It is only a matter of time before such software is put to criminal use.

“There’s a lot of cleverness in designing social engineering attacks, but as far as I know, nobody has yet started using machine learning to find the highest quality suckers,” said Mark Seiden, an independent computer security specialist. He paused and added, “I should have replied: ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t answer that question right now.’”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Op-Ed Columnists - The New York Times

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#####EOF##### The New York Times Magazine - The New York Times

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    How A.S.M.R. Became a Sensation

    The brain-tingling feeling was a hard-to-describe psychological oddity. Until, suddenly, it was a YouTube phenomenon.

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    Taylor Mac Wants Theater to Make You Uncomfortable

    His wild, profane creations confront us with everything horrifying and joyous about America — and ourselves. Now he’s coming for Broadway.

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#####EOF##### Researchers Discover Two Major Flaws in the World’s Computers - The New York Times

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Researchers Discover Two Major Flaws in the World’s Computers

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Paul Kocher, left, moderating the RSA Conference 2016 in San Francisco. Mr. Kocher is an independent researcher who was an integral part of the team that discovered the flaws.CreditCreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Computer security experts have discovered two major security flaws in the microprocessors inside nearly all of the world’s computers.

The two problems, called Meltdown and Spectre, could allow hackers to steal the entire memory contents of computers, including mobile devices, personal computers and servers running in so-called cloud computer networks.

There is no easy fix for Spectre, which could require redesigning the processors, according to researchers. As for Meltdown, the software patch needed to fix the issue could slow down computers by as much as 30 percent — an ugly situation for people used to fast downloads from their favorite online services.

“What actually happens with these flaws is different and what you do about them is different,” said Paul Kocher, a researcher who was an integral member of a team of researchers at big tech companies like Google and Rambus and in academia that discovered the flaws.

Meltdown is a particular problem for the cloud computing services run by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. By Wednesday evening, Google and Microsoft said they had updated their systems to deal with the flaw.

Amazon told customers of its Amazon Web Services cloud service that the vulnerability “has existed for more than 20 years in modern processor architectures.” It said that it had already protected nearly all instances of A.W.S. and that customers must update their own software running atop the service as well.

To take advantage of Meltdown, hackers could rent space on a cloud service, just like any other business customer. Once they were on the service, the flaw would allow them to grab information like passwords from other customers.

That is a major threat to the way cloud-computing systems operate. Cloud services often share machines among many customers — and it is uncommon for, say, a single server to be dedicated to a single customer. Though security tools and protocols are intended to separate customers’ data, the recently discovered chip flaws would allow bad actors to circumvent these protections.

The personal computers used by consumers are also vulnerable, but hackers would have to first find a way to run software on a personal computer before they could gain access to information elsewhere on the machine. There are various ways that could happen: Attackers could fool consumers into downloading software in an email, from an app store or visiting an infected website.

According to the researchers, the Meltdown flaw affects virtually every microprocessor made by Intel, which makes chips used in more than 90 percent of the computer servers that underpin the internet and private business operations.

Customers of Microsoft, the maker of the Windows operating system, will need to install an update from the company to fix the problem. The worldwide community of coders that oversees the open-source Linux operating system, which runs about 30 percent of computer servers worldwide, has already posted a patch for that operating system. Apple had a partial fix for the problem and is expected to have an additional update.

The software patches could slow the performance of affected machines by 20 to 30 percent, said Andres Freund, an independent software developer who has tested the new Linux code. The researchers who discovered the flaws voiced similar concerns.

This could become a significant issue for any business running websites and other software through cloud systems.

There is no evidence that hackers have taken advantage of the vulnerability — at least not yet. But once a security problem becomes public, computer users take a big risk if they do not install a patch to fix the issue. A so-called ransomware attack that hit computers around the world last year took advantage of machines that had not received a patch for a flaw in Windows software.

The other flaw, Spectre, affects most processors now in use, though the researchers believe this flaw is more difficult to exploit. There is no known fix for it, and it is not clear what chip makers like Intel will do to address the problem.

It is not certain what the disclosure of the chip issues will do to Intel’s business, and on Wednesday, the Silicon Valley giant played down the problem.

“Intel and other technology companies have been made aware of new security research describing software analysis methods that, when used for malicious purposes, have the potential to improperly gather sensitive data from computing devices that are operating as designed,” the company said in a statement. “Intel believes these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data.”

The researchers who discovered the flaws notified various affected companies. And as is common practice when such problems are identified, they tried to keep the news from the public so hackers could not take advantage of the flaws before they were fixed.

But on Tuesday, news of the Meltdown flaw began to leak through various news websites, including The Register, a science and technology site based in Britain. So the researchers released papers describing the flaws on Wednesday, much earlier than they had planned.

For now, computer security experts are using a patch, called Kaiser, that was originally discovered by researchers at the Graz University of Technology in Austria to respond to a separate issue last year.

Spectre will be much more difficult to deal with than issuing a software patch.

The Meltdown flaw is specific to Intel, but Spectre is a flaw in design that has been used by many processor manufacturers for decades. It affects virtually all microprocessors on the market, including chips made by AMD that share Intel’s design and the many chips based on designs from ARM in Britain.

Spectre is a problem in the fundamental way processors are designed, and the threat from Spectre is “going to live with us for decades,” said Mr. Kocher, the president and chief scientist at Cryptography Research, a division of Rambus.

“Whereas Meltdown is an urgent crisis, Spectre affects virtually all fast microprocessors,” Mr. Kocher said. An emphasis on speed while designing new chips has left them vulnerable to security issues, he said.

“We’ve really screwed up,” Mr. Kocher said. “There’s been this desire from the industry to be as fast as possible and secure at the same time. Spectre shows that you cannot have both.”

The Meltdown flaw was discovered by Jann Horn, a security analyst at a Google-run security research group called Google Project Zero, last June. Mr. Horn was the first to alert Intel. The chip giant then heard from other researchers who had also discovered the flaw, including Werner Haas and Thomas Prescher, at Cyberus Technology; and Daniel Gruss, Moritz Lipp, Stefan Mangard and Michael Schwarz at the Graz University of Technology.

The researchers had been working through the Christmas holiday on a patch, and coordinating with companies like Microsoft and Amazon to roll out the fix.

The second flaw, Spectre, was also discovered by Mr. Horn at Google and separately by Mr. Kocher, in coordination with Mike Hamburg at Rambus, Mr. Lipp at Graz University and Yuval Yarom at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

A fix may not be available for Spectre until a new generation of chips hit the market.

“This will be a festering problem over hardware life cycles. It’s not going to change tomorrow or the day after,” Mr. Kocher said. “It’s going to take a while.”

Follow Cade Metz and Nicole Perlroth on Twitter: @CadeMetz and @nicoleperloth

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: 2 Big Flaws Discovered In Nearly All Computers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Cyberattacks Put Russian Fingers on the Switch at Power Plants, U.S. Says - The New York Times

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Cyberattacks Put Russian Fingers on the Switch at Power Plants, U.S. Says

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U.S. officials said the strikes accelerated in late 2015, at the same time the Russian interference in the American election was underway.CreditCreditSpencer Platt/Getty Images

The Trump administration accused Russia on Thursday of engineering a series of cyberattacks that targeted American and European nuclear power plants and water and electric systems, and could have sabotaged or shut power plants off at will.

United States officials and private security firms saw the attacks as a signal by Moscow that it could disrupt the West’s critical facilities in the event of a conflict.

They said the strikes accelerated in late 2015, at the same time the Russian interference in the American election was underway. The attackers had compromised some operators in North America and Europe by spring 2017, after President Trump was inaugurated.

In the following months, according to a Department of Homeland Security report issued on Thursday, Russian hackers made their way to machines with access to critical control systems at power plants that were not identified. The hackers never went so far as to sabotage or shut down the computer systems that guide the operations of the plants.

Still, new computer screenshots released by the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday made clear that Russian state hackers had the foothold they would have needed to manipulate or shut down power plants.

“We now have evidence they’re sitting on the machines, connected to industrial control infrastructure, that allow them to effectively turn the power off or effect sabotage,” said Eric Chien, a security technology director at Symantec, a digital security firm.

“From what we can see, they were there. They have the ability to shut the power off. All that’s missing is some political motivation,” Mr. Chien said.

American intelligence agencies were aware of the attacks for the past year and a half, and the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. first issued urgent warnings to utility companies in June. On Thursday, both agencies offered new details as the Trump administration imposed sanctions against Russian individuals and organizations it accused of election meddling and “malicious cyberattacks.”

It was the first time the administration officially named Russia as the perpetrator of the assaults. And it marked the third time in recent months that the White House, departing from its usual reluctance to publicly reveal intelligence, blamed foreign government forces for attacks on infrastructure in the United States.

In December, the White House said North Korea had carried out the so-called WannaCry attack that in May paralyzed the British health system and placed ransomware in computers in schools, businesses and homes across the world. Last month, it accused Russia of being behind the NotPetya attack against Ukraine last June, the largest in a series of cyberattacks on Ukraine to date, paralyzing the country’s government agencies and financial systems.

But the penalties have been light. So far, Mr. Trump has said little to nothing about the Russian role in those attacks.

The groups that conducted the energy attacks, which are linked to Russian intelligence agencies, appear to be different from the two hacking groups that were involved in the election interference.

That would suggest that at least three separate Russian cyberoperations were underway simultaneously. One focused on stealing documents from the Democratic National Committee and other political groups. Another, by a St. Petersburg “troll farm” known as the Internet Research Agency, used social media to sow discord and division. A third effort sought to burrow into the infrastructure of American and European nations.

For years, American intelligence officials tracked a number of Russian state-sponsored hacking units as they successfully penetrated the computer networks of critical infrastructure operators across North America and Europe, including in Ukraine.

Some of the units worked inside Russia’s Federal Security Service, the K.G.B. successor known by its Russian acronym, F.S.B.; others were embedded in the Russian military intelligence agency, known as the G.R.U. Still others were made up of Russian contractors working at the behest of Moscow.

Russian cyberattacks surged last year, starting three months after Mr. Trump took office.

American officials and private cybersecurity experts uncovered a series of Russian attacks aimed at the energy, water and aviation sectors and critical manufacturing, including nuclear plants, in the United States and Europe. In its urgent report in June, the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. notified operators about the attacks but stopped short of identifying Russia as the culprit.

By then, Russian spies had compromised the business networks of several American energy, water and nuclear plants, mapping out their corporate structures and computer networks.

They included that of the Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corporation, which runs a nuclear plant near Burlington, Kan. But in that case, and those of other nuclear operators, Russian hackers had not leapt from the company’s business networks into the nuclear plant controls.

Forensic analysis suggested that Russian spies were looking for inroads — although it was not clear whether the goal was to conduct espionage or sabotage, or to trigger an explosion of some kind.

In a report made public in October, Symantec noted that a Russian hacking unit “appears to be interested in both learning how energy facilities operate and also gaining access to operational systems themselves, to the extent that the group now potentially has the ability to sabotage or gain control of these systems should it decide to do so.”

The United States sometimes does the same thing. It bored deeply into Iran’s infrastructure before the 2015 nuclear accord, placing digital “implants” in systems that would enable it to bring down power grids, command-and-control systems and other infrastructure in case a conflict broke out. The operation was code-named “Nitro Zeus,” and its revelation made clear that getting into the critical infrastructure of adversaries is now a standard element of preparing for possible conflict.

The Russians have gone farther.

In an updated warning to utility companies on Thursday, Homeland Security officials included a screenshot taken by Russian operatives that proved they could now gain access to their victims’ critical controls.

American officials and security firms, including Symantec and CrowdStrike, believe that Russian attacks on the Ukrainian power grid in 2015 and 2016 that left more than 200,000 citizens there in the dark are an ominous sign of what the Russian cyberstrikes may portend in the United States and Europe in the event of escalating hostilities.

Private security firms have tracked the Russian government assaults on Western power and energy operators — conducted alternately by groups under the names DragonFly, Energetic Bear and Berserk Bear — since 2011, when they first started targeting defense and aviation companies in the United States and Canada.

By 2013, researchers had tied the Russian hackers to hundreds of attacks on energy grid and oil and gas pipeline operators in the United States and Europe. Initially, the strikes appeared to be motivated by industrial espionage — a natural conclusion at the time, researchers said, given the importance of Russia’s oil and gas industry.

But by December 2015, the Russian hacks had taken an aggressive turn. The attacks were no longer aimed at intelligence gathering, but at potentially sabotaging or shutting down plant operations.

At Symantec, researchers discovered that Russian hackers had begun taking screenshots of the machinery used in energy and nuclear plants, and stealing detailed descriptions of how they operated — suggesting they were conducting reconnaissance for a future attack.

As the American government enacted the sanctions on Thursday, cybersecurity experts were still questioning where the Russian attacks could lead, given that the United States was sure to respond in kind.

“Russia certainly has the technical capability to do damage, as it demonstrated in the Ukraine,” said Eric Cornelius, a cybersecurity expert at Cylance, a private security firm, who previously assessed critical infrastructure threats for the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration.

“It is unclear what their perceived benefit would be from causing damage on U.S. soil, especially given the retaliation it would provoke,” Mr. Cornelius said.

Though a major step toward deterrence, publicly naming countries accused of cyberattacks still is unlikely to shame them into stopping. The United States is struggling to come up with proportionate responses to the wide variety of cyberespionage, vandalism and outright attacks.

Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, who has been nominated as director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command, the military’s cyberunit, said during his Senate confirmation hearing this month that countries attacking the United States so far have little to worry about.

“I would say right now they do not think much will happen to them,” General Nakasone said. He later added, “They don’t fear us.”

Get politics and Washington news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the Morning Briefing newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Says Hacks Left Russia Able To Shut Utilities. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Saudi Arabia Says Jamal Khashoggi Was Killed in Consulate Fight - The New York Times

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Saudi Arabia Says Jamal Khashoggi Was Killed in Consulate Fight

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BEIRUT, Lebanon — After two weeks of shifting stories, Saudi Arabia said Saturday that its agents strangled Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident journalist, during a fistfight inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and that 18 men had been arrested in the case.

Those arrested included 15 men who were sent to confront Mr. Khashoggi, plus one driver and two consular staff members, a Saudi official said.

Saudi state media reported that Saud al-Qahtani, a close aide to the crown prince, had been dismissed, along with Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, the deputy director of Saudi intelligence, and other high-ranking intelligence officials. The Saudi official said General Assiri had organized the operation and that Mr. Qahtani had known about it and contributed to an aggressive environment that allowed it to escalate.

President Trump on Friday night said that Saudi Arabia’s statements were credible and that, along with its announcement of arrests, amounted to “good first steps.”

[Jamal Khashoggi is dead. Read an update on what we know so far.]

Mr. Trump, who has built strong ties with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, said that he would consider “some form of sanction” in response, but that he “would prefer we don’t use as retribution” the cancellation of $110 billion worth of arms sales to the Saudis.

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A Saudi official has said Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, a high-ranking adviser to the crown prince, organized the operation that killed the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.CreditCreditHasan Jamali/Associated Press

But Representative Adam Schiff of California was not buying the Saudi explanation. Mr. Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview Friday night that “if Khashoggi was fighting inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, he was fighting for his life with people sent to capture or kill him.”

Mr. Schiff, who said he had received a detailed, classified briefing earlier in the day on what American spy services believe were the circumstances, said that the Saudi version “was not credible.” He said he could not disclose what the intelligence agency briefers told him.

Since Mr. Khashoggi disappeared after entering the consulate on Oct. 2, Saudi Arabia has offered various, changing explanations for his disappearance, all of which seemed to distance top leadership from responsibility.

The Saudis initially claimed that Mr. Khashoggi had left the consulate alive and professed to be worried about his fate, later hinting that the killing might have been the act of rogue agents.

But international outrage mounted as Turkish officials leaked lurid details from their own investigation suggesting that he was murdered inside the consulate and dismembered by a team of Saudi agents who flew in specifically to kill him.

The case has battered the international reputation of the kingdom and the 33-year-old Prince Mohammed, who has sought to sell himself to the world as a young reformer shaking off his country’s conservative past. But suspicions that such a complicated foreign operation could not have been launched without at least his tacit approval have driven away many of his staunchest foreign supporters.

For the first time on Saturday, a Saudi official familiar with the government’s handling of the situation put forward the kingdom’s narrative of the events that led to Mr. Khashoggi’s death.

The kingdom had a general order to return dissidents living abroad, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing. When the consulate in Istanbul reported that Mr. Khashoggi would be coming on Oct. 2 to pick up a document needed for his coming marriage, General Assiri dispatched a 15-man team to confront him.

The team included Maher Abdulaziz Mutrib, a security officer identified by The New York Times this week as a frequent member of the crown prince’s security detail during foreign trips, the official said. Mr. Mutrib had been chosen because he had worked with Mr. Khashoggi a decade ago in the Saudi Embassy in London and knew him personally.

But the order to return Mr. Khashoggi to the kingdom was misinterpreted as it made its way down the chain of command, the Saudi official said, and a confrontation ensued when Mr. Khashoggi saw the men. He tried to flee, the men stopped him, punches were thrown, Mr. Khashoggi screamed and one of the men put him in a chokehold, strangling him to death, the official said.

“The interaction in the room didn’t last very long at all,” the official said.

The team then gave the body to a local collaborator to dispose of, meaning that the Saudis do not know where it ended up, the official said.

All 15 members of the team had been identified by name by the Turks, and Turkish newspapers had published their photographs. The New York Times established that most of them were employed by the Saudi military or security services and that at least four had traveled with the crown prince as part of his security detail.

The Turks had said the body had been disassembled with a bone saw by an autopsy specialist flown in specifically for that purpose and probably carried out of the consulate in large suitcases.

Turkish investigators were searching a forest and a farmhouse this week for traces of Mr. Khashoggi’s remains but did not announce their findings.

The reports of Mr. Khashoggi’s killing have shaken members of the Saudi royal family, many of whom were angry about Crown Prince Mohammed’s swift rise over the past three years. Some wondered if the scandal could lead his father, King Salman, to replace him with another prince not tarnished by the case.

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Saudi Arabia now suggests that Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident journalist, was the victim of a premeditated killing at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. It’s the latest in a series of shifting explanations from the kingdom.CreditCreditLakruwan Wanniarachchi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But instead, the king named Crown Prince Mohammed as head of a committee to restructure the kingdom’s intelligence agency.

People with knowledge of the Saudi plans had told The Times on Thursday that the kingdom was planning to blame the operation on General Assiri, the deputy intelligence director. The people said the kingdom would portray the operation as carried out by rogue actors who did not have orders from the top and who had set out to interrogate and kidnap Mr. Khashoggi but ended up killing him, perhaps accidentally.

The dismissal of Mr. Qahtani, considered a close aide to Crown Prince Mohammed, stood out because he plays no public role in security or intelligence. He is in charge of media and communications for the crown prince, and often leads aggressive online attacks against critics of the kingdom.

The Saudi official said Mr. Qahtani had been fired because he had known about the operation and had contributed to an aggressive environment that allowed it to turn violent. While dismissed as an adviser to the royal court, Mr. Qahtani kept his job as head of a cybersecurity organization.

Mr. Khashoggi, 60, was one of Saudi Arabia’s best known personalities, a journalist who had interviewed Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan years before he founded Al Qaeda. He later served as an adviser to and unofficial spokesman for the Saudi royal family.

But his relationship with the kingdom changed during the rise of Crown Prince Mohammed, who has announced broad social and economic reforms but has also gone after critics and cut down many of his fellow royals.

After many of his friends and colleagues were jailed last year, Mr. Khashoggi settled into self-exile in the Washington area and became a columnist for The Washington Post, a position he used to criticize the crown prince’s increasing authoritarianism.

When Mr. Khashoggi did not emerge from the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul after several hours on Oct. 2, his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, began calling Turkish officials to tell them that he was missing.

Saudi Arabia chose to make its announcement in the middle of the night over a weekend in Riyadh and Istanbul. A Turkish official said it was too soon for Ankara to comment, but reaction on social media and elsewhere was dismissive.

Samantha Power, a former ambassador to the United Nations under President Barack Obama, said on Twitter that the Saudis were “shifting from bald-face lies (‘#Khashoggi left consulate’) to faux condemnation (of a ‘rogue operation’) to claiming the fox will credibly investigate what he did to the hen.”

At the United Nations, Secretary General António Guterres cited “the need for a prompt, thorough and transparent investigation into the circumstances of Mr. Khashoggi’s death and full accountability for those responsible.”

But Ali Shihabi, the founder of the Arabia Foundation in Washington and a prominent advocate for the kingdom’s policies, defended the belated statement, arguing that an initial cover-up that hid the truth from the royal court explained the delay.

“Part of the reason for firing so many top intelligence officials was due to the cover-up and slowness in conveying the full details of what happened to the leadership,” he wrote on Twitter. “This tragic fiasco was a huge shock to the Saudi leadership and a combination of confusion, lack of experience in such crisis management and a cover-up by the intelligence bureaucracy contributed to the initial Saudi response.”

Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Saudis will have to provide more information — which may or may not comport with the intelligence that Turkey and the United States have gathered over the past two weeks.

“This has to be the beginning of a multiday effort that is long overdue,” Mr. Alterman said.

The Saudi statement, for example, offered no explanation for why Mr. Khashoggi would enter into an altercation with multiple foes in territory he knew to be dangerous. Mr. Khashoggi was regarded as low key and even-tempered by those who knew him. He felt nervous enough about his safety entering the consulate that he told his fiancée to wait outside with instructions to call the Turkish authorities if he did not come out.

Whether the United States or Turkey is willing to dispute or contradict the Saudi explanation is far from clear. The Saudi narrative seemed to dodge the question of whether the men had been acting at the direction of top officials, as well as the question of where Mr. Khashoggi’s body was.

The Trump administration has spent weeks trying to salvage Saudi Arabia’s role in its strategy to isolate Iran, which will be punctuated by the Nov. 5 reimposition of onerous sanctions lifted under the 2015 Iran nuclear accord.

The Turkish government has said it has recordings that suggest the Saudis ambushed Mr. Khashoggi in the consulate and dismembered him. But Turkey, in the midst of a difficult economic period that could benefit from Saudi investment, may never reveal those recordings.

Elliott Abrams, a former top diplomat in Republican administrations, said that the Saudi acknowledgment was an important first step but that many questions remain unanswered.

“Where is Jamal Khashoggi’s body, for one?” Mr. Abrams asked. “And it’s just hard to believe these people acted without instructions.”

Mr. Abrams also dismissed the core of the Saudi explanation that Mr. Khashoggi had decided to put up a fight.

“He’s in the consulate surrounded by a crowd of men and he starts a fight?” Mr. Abrams asked. “It’s just not credible.”

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from London, Eric Schmitt and Gardiner Harris from Washington, Emily Cochrane from Glendale, Ariz., and Rick Gladstone from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Saudi Arabia Says Critic Was Killed Inside Consulate. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### A Waste of Money and Time - NYTimes.com

A Waste of Money and Time

Bruce Schneier

Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of several books on computer security, including "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World."

Updated October 17, 2012, 3:29 PM

A short history of airport security: We screen for guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We confiscate box cutters and corkscrews, so they put explosives in their sneakers. We screen footwear, so they try to use liquids. We confiscate liquids, so they put PETN bombs in their underwear. We roll out full-body scanners, even though they wouldn’t have caught the Underwear Bomber, so they put a bomb in a printer cartridge. We ban printer cartridges over 16 ounces — the level of magical thinking here is amazing — and they’re going to do something else.

Take all the money spent on new security measures and spend it on investigation and intelligence.

This is a stupid game, and we should stop playing it.

It’s not even a fair game. It’s not that the terrorist picks an attack and we pick a defense, and we see who wins. It’s that we pick a defense, and then the terrorists look at our defense and pick an attack designed to get around it. Our security measures only work if we happen to guess the plot correctly. If we get it wrong, we’ve wasted our money. This isn’t security; it’s security theater.

There are two basic kinds of terrorists. The are the sloppy planners, like the guy who crashed his plane into the Internal Revenue Service building in Austin. He’s going to be sloppy and stupid, and even pre-9/11 airplane security is going to catch him. The second is the well-planned, well-financed, and much rarer sort of plot. Do you really expect the T.S.A. screeners, who are busy confiscating water bottles and making people take off their belts — and now doing uncomfortable pat-downs — to stop them?

Of course not. Airport security is the last line of defense, and it’s not a very good one. What works is investigation and intelligence: security that works regardless of the terrorist tactic or target. Yes, the target matters too; all this airport security is only effective if the terrorists target airports. If they decide to bomb crowded shopping malls instead, we’ve wasted our money.

That being said, airplanes require a special level of security for several reasons: they’re a favored terrorist target; their failure characteristics mean more deaths than a comparable bomb on a bus or train; they tend to be national symbols; and they often fly to foreign countries where terrorists can operate with more impunity.

But all that can be handled with pre-9/11 security. Exactly two things have made airplane travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of checked bags and airport workers and we’re done. Take all the rest of the money and spend it on investigation and intelligence.

Immediately after the Christmas Day Underwear Bomber’s plot failed, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called airplane security a success. She was pilloried in the press and quickly backpedaled, but I think it was one of the most sensible things said on the subject. Plane lands safely, terrorist in custody, nobody injured except the terrorist: what more do people want out of a security success?

Look at what succeeded. Because even pre-9/11 security screened for obvious bombs, Abdulmutallab had to construct a far less reliable bomb than he would have otherwise. Instead of using a timer or a plunger or a reliable detonation mechanism, as would any commercial user of PETN, Abdulmutallab had to resort to an ad hoc and much more inefficient detonation mechanism involving a syringe, 20 minutes in the lavatory, and setting his pants on fire. As a result, his actions came to the notice of the other passengers, who subdued him.

Neither the full-body scanners or the enhanced pat-downs are making anyone safer. They’re more a result of politicians and government appointees capitulating to a public that demands that “something must be done,” even when nothing should be done; and a government bureaucracy that is more concerned about the security of their careers if they fail to secure against the last attack than what happens if they fail anticipate the next one.

Topics: Transportation, airports

Do Body Scanners Make Us Safer?

Travelers are resisting new airport security measures. Are there better options? Read More Â»

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    Scientists Thought They Had Measles Cornered. They Were Wrong.

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#####EOF##### Opinion | The Bitcoin Boom: In Code We Trust - The New York Times

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The Bitcoin Boom: In Code We Trust

Tim Wu

By Tim Wu

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You don’t need brilliant financial analysis skills to notice that Bitcoin is in a bubble. It has grown in value from about 39 cents to over $18,000 in just eight years and recently attracted broad media attention by doubling in just a few days. The conventional wisdom had been that illegal and illicit transactions — buying drugs or transferring money out of Argentina — accounted for much of Bitcoin’s value. Today the mainstream view sees mere greed and speculation.

Yet as Bitcoin continues to grow, there’s reason to think something deeper and more important is going on. Bitcoin’s rise may reflect, for better or worse, a monumental transfer of social trust: away from human institutions backed by government and to systems reliant on well-tested computer code. It is a trend that transcends finance: In our fear of human error, we are putting an increasingly deep faith in technology.

Bitcoin may be in a bubble, but not all bubbles are created equal. Some are shimmering nothings, reflecting little more than an underlying pyramid scheme. But others are like ocean swells that could become enormous waves. Consider the tech stocks of the late 1990s — a bubble, to be sure, but in retrospect, was Amazon really overvalued?

What gives the Bitcoin bubble significance is that, like ’90s tech, it is part of something much larger than itself. More and more we are losing faith in humans and depending instead on machines. The transformation is more obvious outside of finance. We trust in computers to fly airplanes, help surgeons cut into our bodies and simplify daily tasks, like finding our way home. In this respect, finance is actually behind: Where we no longer feel we can trust people, we let computer code take over.

Bitcoin is part of this trend. It was, after all, a carnival of human errors and misfeasance that inspired the invention of Bitcoin in 2009, namely, the financial crisis. Banks backed by economically powerful nations had been the symbol of financial trustworthiness, the gold standard in the post-gold era. But they revealed themselves as reckless, drunk on other people’s money, holding extraordinarily complex assets premised on a web of promises that were often mutually incompatible. To a computer programmer, the financial system still looks a lot like untested code with weak debugging that puts way too much faith in the idea that humans will behave properly. As with any bad software, it can be expected to crash when conditions change.

We might add that major governments — the issuers of currency, the guarantors of banks and enforcers of contracts — do not always inspire confidence. Governments can be tempted to print money recklessly or seize wealth brazenly from their citizens — Venezuelan hyperinflation and Indian demonetization are recent examples. But even the most trusted governments can be dubious. Europe, riddled by internal struggles among states, is still in shock about the planned departure of Britain from the European Union. China is a secretive authoritarian state that can lash out against its citizens and rivals when it feels insecure. The United States, perhaps the main guarantor of world solvency, is some $20 trillion in debt, constantly on the verge of default and headed by a serial bankruptee who prizes unpredictability. It is little wonder that the world’s citizens might be looking for alternatives.

Bitcoin’s fans don’t entirely distrust human institutions. It is rather that they’d prefer not to need to trust humans to keep their promises, when we know that we humans are deeply fallible. That might seem cynical, but perhaps it is appropriately humble. As Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym for the person or persons who invented Bitcoin, puts it, “the root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work.”

This all helps explain the popularity of Bitcoin as an asset independent of government, mainstream banks and their various shenanigans. But still, is it really worth anything at all? It is based on a “blockchain,” a technology that creates a decentralized public ledger and rigorously tracks transfers. It is maintained by its users, and no government can mint more coins. Bitcoin isn’t backed by any sovereign, and unlike a stock or a bond, it gives you a claim to nothing other than Bitcoin itself. Yet that illusory quality is true of most forms of money, a shared hallucination that we tolerate as long as it works. If enough others value something, that can be enough to make it serve as a store of value. Sure, Bitcoin will crash again, but over its lifetime, it has already withstood multiple crashes, runs and splits. It actually feels tested.

This isn’t to idealize Bitcoin. Despite its virtual nature, it is still a human institution, facing its own misdeeds and governance problems. Odds are that Bitcoin may never function well as a general medium of exchange (something you can buy things with) because of its wild fluctuations, but might work fine as a store of value that you can sell. It may, like Netscape circa 1995, be portending changes to come. But Bitcoin has captured something. As much as we may love other humans, it is now in code we trust.

Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia, the author of “The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads” and a contributing opinion writer.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: In Code We Trust. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Disputed N.S.A. Phone Program Is Shut Down, Aide Says - The New York Times

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Disputed N.S.A. Phone Program Is Shut Down, Aide Says

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The National Security Agency has shut down a controversial program that collects domestic phone and text records, a senior Republican congressional aide said.CreditCreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has quietly shut down a system that analyzes logs of Americans’ domestic calls and texts, according to a senior Republican congressional aide, halting a program that has touched off disputes about privacy and the rule of law since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The agency has not used the system in months, and the Trump administration might not ask Congress to renew its legal authority, which is set to expire at the end of the year, according to the aide, Luke Murry, the House minority leader’s national security adviser.

In a raw assertion of executive power, President George W. Bush’s administration started the program as part of its intense pursuit for Qaeda conspirators in the weeks after the 2001 terrorist attacks, and a court later secretly blessed it. The intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden disclosed the program’s existence in 2013, jolting the public and contributing to growing awareness of how both governments and private companies harvest and exploit personal data.

The way that intelligence analysts have gained access to bulk records of Americans’ phone calls and texts has evolved, but the purpose has been the same: They analyze social links to hunt for associates of known terrorism suspects.

Intelligence agencies can use the technique on data obtained through other means, like collection from networks abroad, where there are fewer legal limits. But those approaches do not offer the same systematic access to domestic phone records.

Congress ended and replaced the program disclosed by Mr. Snowden with the U.S.A. Freedom Act of 2015, which will expire in December. Security and privacy advocates have been gearing up for a legislative battle over whether to extend or revise the program — and with what changes, if any.

Mr. Murry, who is an adviser for Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, raised doubts over the weekend about whether that debate will be necessary. His remarks came during a podcast for the national security website Lawfare.

Mr. Murry brought up the pending expiration of the Freedom Act, but then disclosed that the Trump administration “hasn’t actually been using it for the past six months.”

“I’m actually not certain that the administration will want to start that back up,” Mr. Murry said.

He referred to problems that the National Security Agency disclosed last year. “Technical irregularities” had contaminated the agency’s database with message logs it had no authority to collect, so officials purged hundreds of millions of call and text records gathered from American telecommunications firms.

The agency declined to comment on Monday. Press officials with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Council did not respond to requests for comment.

Matt Sparks, a spokesman for Mr. McCarthy’s office, said late Monday that Mr. Murry “was not speaking on behalf of administration policy or what Congress intends to do on this issue.”

Christopher Augustine, an N.S.A. spokesman, told The New York Times in January that agency officials were “carefully evaluating all aspects” of the Freedom Act program, and were discussing its future.

Mr. Augustine made clear that the White House would make the final call about whether to ask Congress to extend the Freedom Act.

The disclosure that the program has apparently been shut down for months “changes the entire landscape of the debate,” said Daniel Schuman, the policy director of Demand Progress, an advocacy group that focuses on civil liberties and government accountability.

Since “the sky hasn’t fallen” without the program, he said, the intelligence community must make the case that reviving it is necessary — if, indeed, the National Security Agency thinks it is worth the effort to keep trying to make it work.

The phone records program had never thwarted a terrorist attack, a fact that emerged during the post-Snowden debate.

“If there is an ongoing program, even if we all have doubts about it, that’s a very different political matter than if the program has actually stopped,” Mr. Schuman said. “Then the question becomes, ‘Why restart it?’ rather than whether to turn it off.”

The National Security Agency has used the call-detail records — metadata showing who called whom and when, but not the content of what was said — as a map of social networks, analyzing links between people to identify associates of terrorism suspects.

Even without the program, the agency could still collect telecommunications data from abroad, which domestic surveillance laws have left largely unregulated. But while overseas-based collection can give some access to Americans’ data, it apparently does not provide the systematic access to purely domestic phone messages.

The phone records program traces back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks when the Bush administration created the secret Stellarwind surveillance program. One component involved the bulk collection of logs of Americans’ domestic phone calls.

Companies like AT&T and MCI — later part of Verizon — initially turned over their customers’ records in response to an order by Mr. Bush. Starting in 2006, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court began issuing secret orders requiring the companies to participate, based on a novel interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which said the F.B.I. may obtain business records “relevant” to a terrorism investigation.

In June 2013, the program came to light after The Guardian published the first revelation from the trove of classified files provided by Mr. Snowden: a top-secret surveillance court order to Verizon to provide its customers’ call records.

The disclosure, one of the most significant by Mr. Snowden, prompted sharp criticism of the government’s theory about why it was legal: Essentially, everyone’s phone records were relevant because the government needed to acquire the haystack so that it could hunt for needles of investigative interest. An appeals court later rejected that theory.

While intelligence officials could not point to attacks the program had thwarted, they defended the ability as a useful triaging tool for sifting through potential connections — and suggested that had it been in place before Sept. 11, it might have helped uncover Al Qaeda’s plot. Critics called that argument exaggerated and portrayed it as a legally dubious invasion of privacy that was ripe for abuse.

The Obama administration eventually embraced a plan to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of domestic phone data but preserve the old program’s analytical ability, resulting in the Freedom Act of 2015.

Under that law, the bulk records remained in the hands of the phone companies, not the government. But with a judge’s permission, the agency could swiftly retrieve the phone and text logs of particular suspects as well as of all of the people who had been in contact with those suspects, even when they were customers of different phone companies.

Under the replacement system, the number of records about Americans’ communications that the agency collected dropped significantly from the billions per day it had previously been sucking in.

Yet the scale of collection remained huge: The program gathered 151 million records in 2016, despite obtaining court orders to use the system on only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016, along with a few left over from late 2015. In 2017, it obtained orders for 40 targets and collected 534 million records.

Problems with the system emerged last year, when the National Security Agency said it had decided to delete its entire database of records gathered since the Freedom Act system became operational. Glenn S. Gerstell, the agency’s general counsel, said in an interview at the time that because of complex technical glitches, one or more telecom providers — he declined to say which — had responded to court orders for records by sending logs to the agency that included both accurate and inaccurate data.

When the agency then fed those numbers back to the telecoms to get the communications logs of all of the people who had been in contact with its targets, it ended up gathering some data of people unconnected to the targets. The agency had no authority to collect their information, nor a practical way to go through its large database and cull those records it should not have gathered. As a result, it decided to purge them all and start over.

But it had not been clear until Mr. Murry’s comments in the podcast that was posted over the weekend that the problems have continued, even as a legislative battle over the Freedom Act — and the inevitable scrutiny of how the program has functioned — has drawn near.

Follow Charlie Savage on Twitter @charlie_savage.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: N.S.A. Has Ended Gleaning of Data From U.S. Phones. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### With Trump, NATO Chief Tries to Navigate Spending Minefields - The New York Times

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With Trump, NATO Chief Tries to Navigate Spending Minefields

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President Trump, a frequent critic of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, claimed credit for increasing European defense spending. On Tuesday, he met with the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, at the White House.CreditCreditAl Drago for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — He flew across the ocean to celebrate NATO’s 70th anniversary with the largest and most important member of the military alliance. So to outsiders it appeared to be an awkward moment on Tuesday for Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, as he sat stiffly by while President Trump criticized German defense spending and predicted that the United States would get along with Russia.

“I accept there are differences, but when it comes to defense spending we all agree,” Mr. Stoltenberg said in an interview after his meeting with Mr. Trump, putting a positive spin on the situation.

He said the president had helped push member states to budget an additional $100 billion in defense spending and credited Mr. Trump with “having a real impact.”

“I say that because it is a fact,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. “Allies are now really stepping up.”

But not all. Germany will most likely slow the growth of its defense spending — meaning that Europe’s economic powerhouse will defy a spending target set by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And other member states are struggling to reach the current goal of spending 2 percent of their economic output on the military by the end of 2024.

The scene on Tuesday was just the latest example of Mr. Stoltenberg’s unenviable efforts to bridge seemingly irreconcilable positions between Europe and the United States.

He is the European leader who has shown the most deft hand with Mr. Trump. A trained statistician, Mr. Stoltenberg came to the White House with charts showing how defense spending has risen.

But his credit of Mr. Trump for the spending increases has annoyed European leaders.

“He is a little too diplomatic,” said Jim Townsend, a former Pentagon official who oversaw relations with NATO and is now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “Sometimes he has a hard time whacking an ally over the head.”

Mr. Stoltenberg has sought to balance Mr. Trump against German politicians, who have made clear they are sick of the president’s demands. The challenge will only grow throughout this week as Mr. Stoltenberg appears before members of Congress to praise both their support of the military alliance and Mr. Trump’s drive for a more equitable share of military burdens.

Germany this year is putting 1.35 percent of its gross domestic product toward defense spending, and in 2020 will spend 1.37 percent. New budget projections by Berlin show Germany will spend 1.25 percent of its economic output by 2023.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and the defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, have said they remain committed to the 2 percent goal. “Germany will keep its promise,” Ms. von der Leyen said Tuesday on German public radio.

Hours later, fueling the pressure, Mr. Trump said member states should spend potentially even more than 2 percent on defense.

In the Oval Office, Mr. Stoltenberg sat stone-faced as Mr. Trump criticized Germany for “not paying their fair share.” The president also predicted: “I think we’ll get along with Russia.”

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German armored vehicles and an American helicopter during NATO-led exercises. Germany’s defense spending levels fall below what President Trump is demanding from alliance members.CreditIrakli Gedenidze/Reuters

Since 2014, NATO has deployed military forces to Eastern Europe to deter Russian aggression. It has also intensified efforts to rebuild European militaries that have eroded since the end of the Cold War.

But the alliance faces an array of challenges it has not previously confronted, and does not yet know how to tackle — including Russian interference in elections and domestic politics, and China’s economic investments in telecommunications networks.

In the interview with The New York Times, Mr. Stoltenberg suggested the alliance’s policy on Russia was consistent with Mr. Trump’s desire for better relations. He pointed to the cooperation by his own home country, Norway, with Russia on fisheries and other matters.

“We now have a strong, common understanding of how to approach Russia,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. “Those allies who were skeptical of dialogue with Russia have seen that we have delivered on deterrence and defense.”

The gatherings to commemorate NATO’s anniversary were originally planned as a week of events in Washington for heads of state and government. But Mr. Trump’s angry speeches, public and private, at other alliance gatherings over the last two years persuaded allies to downgrade the anniversary celebration to a meeting of foreign ministers.

The goal, according to current and former American and European officials, was to limit Mr. Trump’s participation.

Even Tuesday’s meeting with Mr. Trump was not originally on Mr. Stoltenberg’s agenda. But then Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she had invited the NATO chief to address Congress, a speech that is scheduled for Wednesday.

European officials said Mr. Stoltenberg had not yet accepted the invitation when Ms. Pelosi announced it. That put him in the position of potentially leaving Washington without seeing the president but addressing the Democrat-led House, which has approved a measure that seeks to block Mr. Trump from withdrawing from the military alliance.

Last week, NATO made the unusual move of extending Mr. Stoltenberg’s term a second time, by two more years, meaning he would leave office in 2022. It is an acknowledgment of Mr. Stoltenberg’s deft touch not just with Mr. Trump, but also with other difficult alliance leaders, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary.

Mr. Trump endorsed the extension on Tuesday. “I had no doubt in my mind who I wanted,” he said.

European officials said their worries about Mr. Stoltenberg’s cozy relationship with Mr. Trump were pushed aside, largely to avoid giving the president an outsize role in selecting a new NATO leader. Mr. Stoltenberg was scheduled to step down in 2020, at the height of an intense election in the United States.

In the interview with The Times, Mr. Stoltenberg said he had consulted with Ms. Merkel, and noted that the new budget unveiled by Germany was not final. Germany has submitted a spending plan to NATO that shows defense spending rising by 80 percent between 2014 and 2024, he said, adding that he expected Berlin to live up to that plan.

“The Germans have told me it will further increase,” he said.

Friction is growing in Germany. The Social Democrats, Ms. Merkel’s center-left coalition partners who control the finance ministry and were in charge of the latest budget plan, are using the dislike of Mr. Trump in their election campaign ahead of European parliamentary elections in May.

Julianne Smith, a fellow at the Bosch Academy in Berlin and a former Obama administration national security official, said the Social Democrats were using the military budget to show they were the party “that stands up to Donald Trump.”

“This decision became a bit of a referendum on Donald Trump, instead of a referendum on Germany’s hollowed-out forces that desperately need these resources,” she said.

Katrin Bennhold contributed reporting from Berlin, Steven Erlanger from Brussels and Annie Karni from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: NATO Chief Credits Trump for ‘Having a Real Impact,’ and Allies Bristle. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Trump to Withdraw U.S. Forces From Syria, Declaring ‘We Have Won Against ISIS’ - The New York Times

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Trump to Withdraw U.S. Forces From Syria, Declaring ‘We Have Won Against ISIS’

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American Special Forces soldiers in February in northern Syria. “Our boys, our young women, our men — they’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now,” President Trump declared in a video posted Wednesday evening on Twitter.CreditCreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump has ordered the withdrawal of 2,000 American troops from Syria, bringing a sudden end to a military campaign that largely vanquished the Islamic State but ceding a strategically vital country to Russia and Iran.

In overruling his generals and civilian advisers, Mr. Trump fulfilled his frequently expressed desire to bring home American forces from a messy foreign entanglement. But his decision, conveyed via Twitter on Wednesday, plunges the administration’s Middle East strategy into disarray, rattling allies like Britain and Israel and forsaking Syria’s ethnic Kurds, who have been faithful partners in fighting the Islamic State.

The abrupt, chaotic nature of the move — and the opposition it immediately provoked on Capitol Hill and beyond — raised questions about how Mr. Trump will follow through with the full withdrawal. Even after the president’s announcement, officials said, the Pentagon and State Department continued to try to talk him out of it.

“We have won against ISIS,” Mr. Trump declared in a video posted Wednesday evening on Twitter, adding, “Our boys, our young women, our men — they’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now.”

“We won, and that’s the way we want it, and that’s the way they want it,” he said, pointing a finger skyward, referring to American troops who had been killed in battle.

The White House did not provide a timetable or other specifics for the military departure. “We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. Defense Department officials said that Mr. Trump had ordered that the withdrawal be completed in 30 days.

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Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria “rattled the world.”CreditCreditErin Schaff for The New York Times

The decision brought a storm of protest in Congress, even from Republican allies of Mr. Trump’s like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who said he had been “blindsided.” The House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, suggested that the president had acted out of “personal or political objectives” rather than national security interests.

Like many of Mr. Trump’s most disruptive moves, the decision was jolting and yet predictable. For more than a year, and particularly since the Islamic State has been driven from most of its territory in Syria’s north, he has told advisers that he wanted to withdraw troops from the country.

Which Groups Have Control in Syria

As of mid-December, the Syrian government holds the central and southern parts of the country. The United States has 2,000 ground troops in northern and eastern Syria.

Turkey

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lebanon

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By Sarah Almukhtar | Source: Conflict Monitor by IHS Markit

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other top national security officials argued that a withdrawal would, essentially, surrender Western influence in Syria to Russia and Iran. The Trump administration’s national security policy calls for challenging both countries, which are the chief benefactors of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and have provided him with years of financial and military support.

Abandoning the Kurdish allies, the officials argued, also would cripple future American efforts to gain the trust of local fighters for counterterrorism operations, including in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.

The Russian Foreign Ministry welcomed the move, according to the TASS news agency, saying that a withdrawal created prospects for a political settlement in Syria’s civil war. It also said an initiative to form a Syrian constitutional committee would have a bright future once American troops were gone.

While Mr. Trump has long cast American military involvement in Syria as narrowly focused on defeating the Islamic State, his generals and diplomats argue that the United States has broader, more complex interests there.

Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of United States Central Command, and Brett H. McGurk, the American envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, fiercely protested the military withdrawal, administration officials said. Both argued that the Islamic State would never have been defeated without the Kurdish fighters, whom General Votel said suffered many casualties and always lived up to their word.

Officials said General Votel argued that withdrawing American troops would leave the Kurds vulnerable to attack from Turkey, which has warned it will soon launch an offensive against them. It would also cement the survival of Mr. Assad, whose ouster had long been an article of faith in Washington.

The Pentagon said in a statement that it would “continue working with our partners and allies to defeat” the Islamic State wherever it operated.

Mr. Trump’s decision contradicted what other top national security officials have said in recent weeks.

Two months ago, the national security adviser, John R. Bolton, said the United States would not pull out of Syria as long as Iran was exerting influence there, either through its own troops or Iranian-backed militias.

Last week, Mr. McGurk characterized the mission in Syria as one that sought the “enduring defeat” of the Islamic State. “We know that once the physical space is defeated, we can’t just pick up and leave,” he told reporters. “We want to stay on the ground and make sure that stability can be maintained in these areas.”

Military commanders fear that a hasty withdrawal will jeopardize the territorial gains against the Islamic State made by the United States and its coalition partners — essentially repeating what happened after Mr. Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, pulled troops from Iraq in 2011.

Mr. Graham, emerging from a lunch with Vice President Mike Pence and other Republican senators, called it “Iraq all over again.” He demanded to know why Congress was not notified of Mr. Trump’s decision.

“If Obama had done this,” Mr. Graham said, “we’d be going nuts right now: how weak, how dangerous.”

During the meeting, officials said Mr. Pence barely talked about the looming government shutdown, which he was ostensibly on Capitol Hill to discuss, because there was such strong pushback from lawmakers on Syria.

In a letter to Mr. Trump, Mr. Graham and five other senators, from both parties, implored him to reconsider his decision, warning that a withdrawal would embolden the remnants of the Islamic State, as well as the Assad government, Iran and Russia.

American allies were notably muted in their reactions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called it “of course, an American decision,” and said his government would study its implications. But analysts said the withdrawal would deal a blow to Israel’s efforts to curb Iranian influence in Syria.

“It’s a bad day for Israel,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

A statement released by the British government said that while the global coalition against the Islamic State had made progress, “we must not lose sight of the threat they pose.”

“Even without territory,” the statement said, the group “will remain a threat.”

For much of the day, the White House seemed paralyzed by Mr. Trump’s sudden move. By late Wednesday, it had yet to defend the consequences of the troop withdrawal, or explain what the American strategy in Syria will be once the American forces have left.

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Mr. Trump promised during the 2016 presidential campaign to withdraw American troops from Syria, and he has been looking for a way out since.CreditSarah Silbiger/The New York Times

In a conference call with reporters, a senior White House official said that previous statements by Mr. Bolton and other senior officials that the United States would stay in Syria did not matter because, as president, Mr. Trump could do as he pleases.

“He gets to do that,” said the official, whom the White House said could speak only on grounds of anonymity. “That’s his prerogative.”

The official referred all questions about how the withdrawal would proceed to the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, reporters asked officials for clarification, only to be told that there was none that could be given.

It was very much the image of a story spinning out of control, and a military taken by surprise by its commander in chief.

One Defense Department official suggested that Mr. Trump wanted to divert attention from his mounting legal troubles: the Russia investigation; the sentencing of his former personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, in a hush money scandal to buy the silence of two women who said they had affairs with him; and his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, who was harshly criticized by a federal judge for lying to investigators.

In a statement, Ms. Pelosi derided what she described as a “hasty announcement” and noted it was timed to the day after Mr. Flynn was in court for sentencing after admitting “he was a registered foreign agent for a country with clear interests in the Syrian conflict.”

She was referring to Mr. Flynn’s lobbying efforts to expel a Turkish cleric living in Pennsylvania whom President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has accused of plotting a failed 2016 coup.

“All Americans should be concerned,” Ms. Pelosi said.

Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and the outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said after a visit to the White House, where his farewell meeting with Mr. Trump was canceled, that he did not believe there was a way to persuade the president to reverse the withdrawal order.

“It’s obviously a political decision,” Mr. Corker said.

Not everybody faulted the president’s move.

Robert S. Ford, the last American ambassador to Syria, said the United States could continue to strike terrorist targets from the air. The limited nature of the American ground presence, he said, would not force Iran out of the country, nor would it alter the battle between Mr. Assad and the remnants of the rebellion.

“The whole Syrian conflict is about Syrians’ relations with other Syrians,” said Mr. Ford, who now teaches at Yale and is a fellow at the Middle East Institute. “Two thousand special operators and a dozen or two American diplomats can’t fix that.”

Reporting was contributed by Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Edward Wong, Emily Cochrane and Julian E. Barnes from Washington, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, and Vivian Yee from Beirut, Lebanon.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Ends Mission in Syria as Trump Pulls 2,000 Troops. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#####EOF##### Documents Show Link Between AT&T and Agency in Eavesdropping Case - The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO, April 12 — Mark Klein was a veteran AT&T technician in 2002 when he began to see what he thought were suspicious connections between that telecommunications giant and the National Security Agency.

But he kept quiet about it until news broke late last year that President Bush had approved an N.S.A. program to eavesdrop without court warrants on Americans suspected of ties to Al Qaeda.

Now Mr. Klein and a few company documents he saved have emerged as key elements in a class-action lawsuit filed against AT&T on Jan. 31 by a civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The suit accuses the company of helping the security agency invade its customers' privacy.

Mr. Klein's account and the documents provide new details about how the agency works with the private sector in intercepting communications for intelligence purposes.

The documents, some of which Mr. Klein had earlier provided to reporters, describe a mysterious room at the AT&T Internet and telephone hub in San Francisco where he worked.

Continue reading the main story

The documents, which were examined by four independent telecommunications and computer security experts at the request of The New York Times, describe equipment capable of monitoring a large quantity of e-mail messages, Internet phone calls, and other Internet traffic.

The equipment, which Mr. Klein said was installed by AT&T in 2003, was able to select messages that could be identified by keywords, Internet or e-mail addresses or country of origin and divert copies to another location for further analysis.

The security agency began eavesdropping without warrants on international phone calls and e-mail messages of people inside the United States suspected of terrorist links soon after the Sept. 11 attacks.

After disclosing the program last December, The New York Times also reported that the agency had gathered data from phone and e-mail traffic with the cooperation of several major telecommunications companies.

The technical experts all said that the documents showed that AT&T had an agreement with the federal government to systematically gather information flowing on the Internet through the company's network.

The gathering of such information, known as data mining, involves the use of sophisticated computer programs to detect patterns or glean useful intelligence from masses of information.

"This took expert planning and hundreds of millions of dollars to build," said Brian Reid, director of engineering at the Internet Systems Consortium in Redwood City, Calif. "This is the correct way to do high volume Internet snooping."

Another expert, who had designed large federal and commercial data networks, said that the documents were consistent with administration assertions that the N.S.A. monitored only foreign communications and communications between foreign and United States locations, partly because of the location of the monitoring sites. The network designer was granted anonymity because he believed that commenting on the operation could affect his ability to work as a consultant.

The documents referred to a second location, in Atlanta, and suggested similar rooms might exist at other AT&T switching sites.

Mr. Klein said other AT&T technicians had told him of such installations in San Jose, Calif.; Los Angeles; San Diego; and Seattle.

The Internet hubs there carry a significant amount of international traffic. The network designer and other experts said it would be a simple technical matter to reprogram the equipment to intercept purely domestic Internet traffic.

The Department of Justice initially asked the Electronic Frontier Foundation not to file Mr. Klein's documents in court, but a review determined that they were not classified and the government dropped its objection. The foundation filed the documents under seal because of concern about releasing proprietary information.

On Monday, AT&T filed a motion with a federal judge in San Francisco asking the court to order the foundation to return the documents because they were proprietary.

The documents showed that the room in San Francisco, which Mr. Klein says was off-limits to most employees but serviced by a company technician working with the security agency, contained computerized equipment that could sift through immense volumes of traffic as it passed through the cables of AT&T's WorldNet Internet service.

According to the documents, e-mail messages and other data carried by 16 other commercial Internet providers reached AT&T customers through the San Francisco hub.

One piece of filtering equipment described in the documents was manufactured by Narus, based in Mountain View, Calif.

The equipment could be programmed to identify and intercept voice or data conversations between e-mail, telephone or Internet addresses, said Steve Bannerman, the company's vice president for marketing.

Buyers included companies trying to comply with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which requires that communications systems have a wiretapping capability built in.

Typically, law enforcement interceptions are done on a case by case basis and require warrants.

Mr. Bannerman said he could not comment further because Narus had not announced any sales to the federal government. William P. Crowell, a former deputy director of the N.S.A, is on the Narus board.

In an interview, Mr. Klein said he did not have a security clearance but had witnessed interactions between colleagues who did have clearances and the highly secretive N.S.A. "It was strange and sort of suspicious," he said.

Mr. Klein said he learned of an agency connection to the mysterious room in 2002 when a company manager told him to expect a visit from an N.S.A. official who wanted to speak with another senior company technician about "a special job." That technician later installed the equipment in the room, he said.

Based on his observations and technical knowledge, Mr. Klein concluded that the equipment permitted "vacuum-cleaner surveillance" of Internet traffic. Mr. Klein, 60, who retired in 2004 after 23 years with AT&T and lives near Oakland, Calif., said he decided to make his observations known because he believed the government's monitoring was violating Americans' civil liberties.

An AT&T spokesman at the company's corporate headquarters in San Antonio declined to comment on Mr. Klein's statements.

"AT&T does follow all laws with respect to assistance offered to government agencies," said Walt Sharp, the AT&T spokesman. "However, we are not in a position to comment on matters of national security."

Asked to comment, Don Weber, a spokesman for the N.S.A., said, "It would be irresponsible of us to discuss actual or alleged operational issues as it would give those wishing to do harm to the United States the ability to adjust and potentially inflict harm."

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#####EOF##### Katie Benner

Katie Benner

Katie Benner covers the Justice Department for The New York Times and she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. More

Katie Benner covers the Justice Department for The New York Times and she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues.

She has worked in The Times' San Francisco Bureau covering Apple, venture capital and startups. She helped steer the paper's coverage of the encryption fight between Apple and the FBI and investigated how tech employees chasing the Silicon Valley dream are short-changed by executives and investors. Most recently she's written about sexual harassment in the tech industry and the legal contracts used to keep that behavior a secret .

Before coming to The Times, Katie was a tech columnist at Bloomberg. She also spent nearly a decade at Fortune, where she covered financial markets, private equity and hedge funds. Her work includes profiles of Hank Paulson, Robert Schiller and Reid Hoffman as well as features on the 2008 financial crisis and financial fraud investigations.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Call to Regulate Facebook, Explained

Here’s why the Facebook chief executive invited Congress to regulate his company in a post on Saturday.

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Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, at Senate hearings last year. With the expectation that personal data handling and content restrictions are coming, Facebook tries in an op-ed piece to set the playing field.CreditCreditTom Brenner/The New York Times

Facebook has faced months of scrutiny for a litany of ills, from spreading misinformation to not properly protecting its users’ data to allowing foreign meddling in elections.

Many at the Silicon Valley company now expect lawmakers and regulators to act to contain it — so the social network is trying to set its own terms for what any regulations should look like.

That helps explain why Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post on Saturday laying out a case for how he believes his company should be treated.

In his post, Mr. Zuckerberg discussed four policy areas — harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability — which he said the government should focus attention on.

Here’s an annotated analysis of Mr. Zuckerberg’s post and what he is seeking to do with each area.

First, harmful content. Facebook gives everyone a way to use their voice, and that creates real benefits — from sharing experiences to growing movements. As part of this, we have a responsibility to keep people safe on our services. That means deciding what counts as terrorist propaganda, hate speech and more. We continually review our policies with experts, but at our scale we'll always make mistakes and decisions that people disagree with.

So-called harmful content across Facebook is an enormous category, spanning abuse and bullying to the recent live-streamed shootings at two mosques in New Zealand. With more than 2.7 billion people regularly using Facebook’s services, policing such content is far and away the most difficult issue facing the company.

By saying that “Facebook gives everyone a way to use their voice,” Mr. Zuckerberg makes something clear: The social network’s sheer size means there will forever be errors, mistakes and things that it misses. Tens of billions of posts are shared to the network every day, making it impossible to keep the platform clear of harmful content.

Facebook has had a difficult time deciding what is and isn’t allowed on its site. Its policies often seem to be defined by its most extreme cases, which often spur outrage when handled poorly by the company’s content moderators.

If Facebook’s policy determinations will always cause dissatisfaction, then it may be better to leave it up to lawmakers to write the rules for it. By adhering to the letter of the law, Facebook can effectively shield itself from blame when something inevitably goes awry.

Second, legislation is important for protecting elections. Facebook has already made significant changes around political ads: Advertisers in many countries must verify their identities before purchasing political ads. We built a searchable archive that shows who pays for ads, what other ads they ran and what audiences saw the ads. However, deciding whether an ad is political isn't always straightforward. Our systems would be more effective if regulation created common standards for verifying political actors.

For years, Facebook has maintained little oversight over its political advertising practices. The company raked in revenue by the billions of dollars on the back of its automated advertising system. Wall Street loved Facebook’s reliable blockbuster financial results and the company’s stock soared.

But after evidence showed foreign actors purchased Facebook ads to sway the 2016 presidential election in the United States, the company has had to quickly build systems that monitor and control the types of ads allowed on its network.

Yet Facebook has had a difficult time determining what is and is not a political advertisement. Last year, publishers ran into issues promoting their political news stories on Facebook as the company’s new systems began classifying those stories as political ads.

It would serve Facebook to let lawmakers determine what is and is not a political advertisement. When the next erroneous outburst inevitably occurs, Facebook could point toward the law it was forced to follow.

Third, effective privacy and data protection needs a globally harmonized framework. People around the world have called for comprehensive privacy regulation in line with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, and I agree. I believe it would be good for the internet if more countries adopted regulation such as GDPR as a common framework.

Since the European Union implemented stringent privacy guidelines to protect consumer data last year, one of the most consistent worries from the technology community has been how tough this might make life for the start-up community. That’s because start-ups typically don’t have the resources to comply with so many rules.

But Facebook is a deep-pocketed, well-staffed and mature company. It can take time and effort to make sure its systems are acting in full accordance with privacy regulations in every country.

Facebook also grew to an enormous size by collecting user data when there were virtually no online privacy regulations about this practice. If laws are enacted to limit data collection in the future, Facebook may be able to squash smaller companies who want to challenge Mr. Zuckerberg’s dominance in social networking.

Finally, regulation should guarantee the principle of data portability. If you share data with one service, you should be able to move it to another. This gives people choice and enables developers to innovate and compete.

This paragraph is perhaps the most self-serving of all of Mr. Zuckerberg’s proposals. Though clothed in the language of openness and choice, it is essentially a way for Facebook to argue that it does not have a monopoly on social networking.

Facebook claims its users would be able to freely take their information from one network to the next, giving people the ability to choose where they spend their time while allowing competitors a fair chance at winning over audiences.

In reality, Facebook already owns the lion’s share of much of the world’s social networking companies — Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. And Mr. Zuckerberg is moving to integrate the messaging services he owns, further tightening the networks of users across all of his services. (This move may make it more difficult for lawmakers to break up Mr. Zuckerberg’s company, something he has gone to great lengths to defend against.)

Facebook’s nascent effort at making its social graph interoperable with other companies has already been middling. It has been just enough to show that Facebook is making an effort — but not much more.

Mike Isaac is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. He covers Uber, Facebook and Twitter, among other companies​. He previously worked for Re/Code, AllThingsD and WIRED, and began his career writing about music for Paste Magazine and Performer. @MikeIsaac • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: After Zuckerberg’s Invitation to Regulate Facebook, a Closer Look. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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